One of the leading developers of location-based intelligence systems, US-Spanish company Carto has announced the availability of Traffico, a traffic management solution powered by crowdsourced GPS data.
Crowdsourced data is critical to achieving an accurate view of any urban transport challenge, but aggregating these real-time data streams from across multiple departments into a single view can be a challenge for cities with limited resources.
The issues are only compounded by the growth of connected cities and the increased deployment of traffic sensors. Urban planners and city operations managers require the ability to address all of these data sources and unique factors that contribute to urban traffic congestion. Based in New York City and Madrid, Spain, Carto has developed a packaged system that helps cities better understand traffic mobility patterns, and inform better decisions about infrastructure and traffic management by combining real-time and historical traffic data from city sources and the Waze API (application programming interface).
Carto says its Traffico platform offers cities a single viewpoint of multiple sources of data to:
• Identify locations where public transportation accessibility would have the largest potential to reduce congestion;
• Plan repair and maintenance work for transportation systems during times that will cause the least disruption;
• Reduce incident response times by routing emergency response teams through streets with the lowest travel times.
Traffico allows traffic managers to analyze open source data streams alongside real-time and historical city data made available through the Waze Connected Citizens Program (CCP), a data exchange program built on a community-centric rather than a commuter-centric approach to addressing mobility problems. The Spanish capital, Madrid, will be the first city in Europe to make use of the Traffico platform for decision making.
“The trend toward urbanization is not slowing down, and the need for better city and traffic planning has become apparent around the globe. City planners have a lot on their plate and gathering the right data shouldn’t be a barrier to using it to improve the community,” said Javier de la Torre, CEO of Carto.
“Our goal is to provide access to quality data analytics so that cities can focus on creating strategies to address areas of congestion, and quickly allocate resources to areas that need it most.”
Avichai Bakst, director of partnerships for the EMEA region at Waze, noted, “Through the Connected Citizens Program, we empower our partners to harness real-time driver insights to make better informed planning decisions, and ultimately eliminate traffic altogether. No one knows more about what is happening on the roads than ‘Wazers’, and the City of Madrid will be able to use these anonymous insights to further promote safer roads. In exchange, the City of Madrid is providing critical road closure and incident data to us, helping our users better circumvent major traffic events and real-time traffic blocks.”
Luis Cueto Alvarez de Sotomayor, general coordinator of the Mayor’s Office in Madrid, added, “We have already taken an innovative approach when it comes to traffic congestion measures, and we see Carto’s Traffico as the next step toward an even smarter, safer city. We are excited to combine real-time data with location intelligence to improve the citizen experience.”
