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

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.