Philippines tries to solve its crippling traffic jams with live data
Manila is notorious for its traffic jams, and the Philippine capital is trying to use data to solve the problem.
Ride-hailing app Grab announced Tuesday it's working with the World Bank and the Philippine government to make its traffic data available to the Southeast Asian nation, in the hopes of helping authorities move faster to address traffic blockages.
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Grab provides an Uber X-like service in the Philippines, allowing riders to catch rides from private vehicles. With these cars traversing the streets of Metro Manila and Cebu City, Grab has a valuable trove of live traffic data that the city government can use to visualise the flow of traffic on its streets.
The Singapore-headquartered firm said it hopes delays and accidents reflected in the data can help traffic police fix blocks and issues, to help keep cars moving.
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Deevya Desai, Grab's regional head of public affairs, told Mashable that its data is fed into a custom web-based dashboard was built for government use, and shows a visualisation of journey times and travel speeds.
Eventually, Grab plans to open the platform to other cities in Southeast Asia -- where its business operates -- like Vietnam and Indonesia, she said.
The company has been testing the platform it calls OpenTraffic with the World Bank since April last year. Grab started operating in the Philippines in August 2013.
Manila's crippling jams have been the subject of discourse for years. In a speech in January, a senior advisor at the American Chamber of Commerce noted that the city may become "unliveable" in four years' time if the traffic doesn't improve.
In a 2014 report, the Japan International Cooperation Agency estimated that Manila suffers losses of about $50.6 million each day from time wasted sitting in traffic and additional fuel costs.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
