Grab Ties Up With World Bank To Help Philippine Ease Traffic

App-based transport service Grab on Tuesday announced a partnership with World Bank to provide the government with free GPS data to better manage travel speeds and journey times in two of the Philippines’ largest cities — Manila and Cebu.

Through the OpenTraffic initiative, Grab and World Bank aim to help address traffic congestion and road safety challenges under the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) and its concerned agencies.

Aside from OpenTraffic, another initiative dubbed Driver will meanwhile identify road incident blackspots and improve emergency response.

To date, 200 government staff from the agency, the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and the Cebu City Transportation Office have been trained to use the OpenTraffic platform.

DOTC Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya in a statement welcomed the initiative noting that using big data is one of the “potential solutions” to the challenges faced by the country’s transport systems.

“Through this we can provide accurate, real-time information that can help alleviate traffic congestion and improve road safety,” Abaya said.

Grab Philippines Head Poch Ceballos for his part expressed pride in collaborating with the DOTC and World Bank on the OpenTraffic program.

“We share a common objective of using big data to make critical decisions about traffic and infrastructure management,” Ceballos said.

“With Grab’s network of drivers traveling across Philippine cities every day, there is a rich real-time GPS dataset now readily available to DOTC as our public service,” he added.

During a press conference, Grab shared facts from the OpenTraffic initiative which enumerated several vital transport points to consider.

According to the 2015 testing of OpenTraffic platform in the Philippines, the best time to travel in Metro Manila is at 4 a.m. on Monday. Passengers are meanwhile advised to avoid streets at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays.

The platform also noted that the maximum weekday travel speeds is 36 kph in Cebu City, 31 kph in Davao, 38 kph in Manila.

The percentage difference between maximum travel speeds (when residents are sleeping) and minimum speeds (during the worst weekday congestion) is 80 percent in Cebu City, 90 percent in Manila, 63 percent in Davao.

It noted that traveling home on EDSA on a rainy month could go as fast as 3 km/hour but traveling southbound would be 32 km/hour.

The day of the week with Manila’s fewest road incidents is Sunday.

In 2015, Cebu City Transportation Office (CCTO) reported at least one traffic accident every three days at the Fuente Osmena Circle roundabout.

Drive with caution at the EDSA, Ortigas in Manila where PNP reported nearly one accident per day in 2015.

The day of the week with the highest number of reported Manila traffic injuries and fatalities is Friday. (PNA) RMA/ANP