Bangalore's B-Trac Project

For Aamer Khan, 32, a media marketing professional in India’s tech hub, the journey to the city airport from his residence at RT Nagar, a northern suburb, can take almost as much time as it takes to reach on a flight to Mumbai, a trip he makes twice a month.

The 15km drive to the airport takes on an average 90 minutes, but with Bangalore’s already clogged roads adding almost 1,000 cars and two-wheelers a day, Khan says the road trip till he reaches the airport is always tense.

That’s because a majority of the roads that connect different points of the 800 sq. km city witnesses bumper-to-bumper traffic, with an average vehicle speed of 10km per hour. The city, which has a population of 6.5 million, has more than three million vehicles, almost one for every two citizens, compared, on average, with seven-eight vehicles per 1,000 Indians nationwide.

Early in June, an ambitious Bangalore traffic improvement project called B-Trac, a multi-pronged strategy by the police to improve the traffic situation in the city by 2010, got under way.

The Rs350 crore project includes a data centre that holds information on vehicles in the city and traffic offences, as well as cameras placed across the city to capture traffic movement. Around 280 traffic sub-inspectors have been given Blackberry mobile email devices with printers to issue fines and collect payments for traffic offences.

One of the more interesting features of the project also offers citizens real-time traffic updates that estimate the travel time between destinations.
Khan is already among its first users. He now plans his journey within the city by sending a text message to a number, giving the location he needs to reach, and gets an immediate response of the estimated time it would take based on cellphone usage patterns on roads.

“Whenever somebody sends an SMS to 54321 enquiring about travel time between, say, Brigade Road and Airport Road, our server does the calculation and messages back to the subscriber,” said Ashwin Mahesh, chief executive of Mapunity Information Services, a city-based start-up firm focused on developing geo-spatial applications.

Mapunity, incubated at the NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the Indian Institute of Management here, built the traffic management system which is powered by around 200 micro towers of mobile operator Bharti Airtel Ltd. An additional 200 towers are set to be added in the next few months, Mahesh says.

The Bharti Airtel micro towers capture signals of active mobile phones at a particular junction (though only Airtel mobiles), and send back the information to a server hosted at Mapunity’s premises, which in turn analyses the cellular density as a proxy for traffic density.

A public display that estimates journey time from MG Road, the city’s main centre, to the airport, around 9km away, is already in place at the junction of Trinity Circle.