GO! Traffic, a mobile app that is expected to monitor and provide real-time update on the traffic situation in Dhaka, launched their beta version on Monday.
The app was launched after founders Farhan Rahman, Qasim Rana and Swagata Prateek experimented on obtaining real-time traffic updates both through their dedicated 12-member team, and crowdsourced from users across Dhaka who posted their updates on the Facebook group GO! Traffic Updates (by GObd.co).
"As of last week, we started a manual data collection effort with a team of 12 people that are deployed at certain intersections of the city," Qasim told the Dhaka Tribune. "We’ve set up a little call center in our office and we’re constantly collecting data and reflecting that on our website and into our app."
The app, which is continuously updated by both team members as well as other users, is colour coded: green means "Low Traffic," orange means "Medium Traffic," and red means "High Traffic." Some areas are marked grey, meaning the traffic status is unknown.
The beta mobile app that was launched on Monday is expected to monitor and provide real-time update on the traffic situation in Dhaka.
The Facebook group has only been active for little over a month, but already has more than 2,500 users, which shows the high demand for a solution such as this.
In addition to the reporting capabilities included in the mobile app, the group is instrumental in the functioning of the app.
"Anything you post on the Facebook group is reflected on the web app," Farhan told the Dhaka Tribune. "Any post in the Facebook group that includes the keywords 'heavy,' 'moderate,' 'medium,' 'light,' 'low,' and/or 'clear" - in other words, terms that are often used to describe traffic intensity - "get picked up along with the location (when tagged), which then notes the mobile latitude and longitude and pushes it to the app, and drops a pin right there."
Thus heavy traffic areas, once tagged by several people, will show a red pin on the app to a user. The app is currently in beta (soft launch) stage and is expected to expand in the future in terms of its features.
"We’re not going to be able to boil it down to perfect science, but we'll boil it down to some science, some sort of method so that we’re be able to say what we expect based on everything we’ve seen in the past," says Farhan.
You can download the beta app for Andoroid here.
