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Traffic 411: a traffic congestion routing and awareness platform for Nairobi

Published: 24 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

According to UN-HABITAT, the city of Nairobi loses half a million USD daily due to congestion on roads designed for a city 10 times smaller. To address the traffic congestion problem in Nairobi, we develop a platform called Traffic 411 that provides drivers with real-time traffic and routing information. Traffic 411 incorporates locally relevant context (such as references to landmarks) to predict congestion and create traffic awareness. Our work extends a novel approach called Frugal Innovation developed at the IBM Tokyo Research Lab (TRL), where Web cameras covering only 3.5% of the roads in Nairobi are used to estimate traffic conditions. We deployed the Traffic 411 platform in Nairobi and our initial evaluation indicates that Traffic 411 enhances the driving experience and can be deployed in similar cities.

References

[1]
Kenya Ministry of Planning, 2010.
[2]
IBM Commuter Pain Survey. http://goo.gl/UMtN4M, 2011.
[3]
Nuance, Inc. Nuance solutions and services that can help you speech-enable your IVR. http://www.nuance.com/index.htm, Last accessed June 2013.
[4]
M. Tatsubori and M. Teraguchi. Frugal Innovation for Smarter Transportation in Nairobi. IBM Research -- Tokyo, June 2013.

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  1. Traffic 411: a traffic congestion routing and awareness platform for Nairobi

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SAC '14: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
    March 2014
    1890 pages
    ISBN:9781450324694
    DOI:10.1145/2554850
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 24 March 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. developing countries
    2. mobile application
    3. road-traffic estimation
    4. smarter planet
    5. traffic congestion

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    SAC 2014
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    SAC 2014: Symposium on Applied Computing
    March 24 - 28, 2014
    Gyeongju, Republic of Korea

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    SAC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 218 of 939 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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    The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
    March 31 - April 4, 2025
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