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The OpenTraffic initiative will enable traffic management agencies and city planners to access real-time data to better manage traffic flows in Cebu City and Metro Manila

Southeast Asia’s leading taxi hailing company Grab has partnered with the World Bank and Philippines’ Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) to launch an initiative aimed at addressing the traffic congestion and road safety challenges in the country.

The OpenTraffic initiative will enable traffic management agencies and city planners to access real-time data to better manage traffic flows on the streets of Cebu City and Metro Manila.

In the near future, traffic statistics derived through OpenTraffic will be fed into another app called DRIVER (Data for Road Incident Visualisation, Evaluation, and Reporting) for road incident recording and analysis. This app, developed by the World Bank, will help engineering units to prioritise crash-prone areas for interventions and improve emergency response.

“We are proud to collaborate with the DOTC and World Bank on the OpenTraffic programme to help address traffic congestion along Metro Manila’s major thoroughfares, making local public transportation systems safe and accessible for commuters,” said Poch Ceballos, Head of GrabTaxi, Grab Philippines.

“We share a common objective of using Big Data to make critical decisions about traffic and infrastructure management. With Grab’s network of drivers travelling across Philippine cities every day, there is a rich real-time GPS dataset now readily available to DOTC as our public service,” he added.

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Grab and the World Bank have been developing free, open-source tools that translate Grab’s driver GPS data into anonymised traffic statistics, including speeds, flows, and intersection delays. These statistics power Big Data open source tools such as OpenTraffic, for analysing traffic speeds and flows, and DRIVER, for identifying road incident black spots and improving emergency response timing.

Last month, the World Bank and DOTC helped train more than 200 government staff from the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and the Cebu City Transportation Office on the use of the OpenTraffic platform.

Grab and the World Bank plan to make OpenTraffic available to other Southeast Asian city governments in the near future.

Grab is the leading ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia and operates in 30 cities across six countries – Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

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