Bengaluru traffic, which made international headlines last year due to the cancellation of Trevor Noah’s show, is now finding technology and data-driven solutions.

Bengaluru Traffic Police has started collecting real-time data from 43 tech parks, map providers, aggregators and drones to intervene immediately and create a model that can predict traffic gridlock, especially in the IT corridor. The police are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze this data and create a robust database.

However, data crunching has also revealed some strange reasons behind the traffic flow. For example, during Thanksgiving weekend in the United States last year, peak-hour traffic in the city shifted from the usual time – 8–11 am to just after 11 am – although this was during the middle of the week. Was. Traffic police believe this could have happened because the IT crowd, which had a holiday, had gone out for other activities around noon. Joint Commissioner of Police (JCP), Traffic, MN Anucheth said, “We have a planned calendar of events for India, but we realized that we need to include the US or other regions, as Bengaluru does not provide services to those places. gives.”

Recently, traffic congestion was seen on NICE Road around 5:15 am. Upon further investigation, the police found out that a herd of elephants was crossing the road. “We want to understand how traffic flows at a volumetric level. We have taken data from various sources. All this is captured by AI, which gives alerts. We are getting alerts every 15 minutes, so we can intervene accordingly. We are also looking at developing a baseline model to predict how much traffic a road can handle. Once we get a good amount of data with learning, we will be able to adopt a predictive model in four-five months,” Anucheth said.

The police are also getting detailed information like the number of cab rides booked towards the Tech Park and data of vehicles parked at the Tech Park till 2 pm, so that they can track the traffic coming to the Tech corridor during the evening peak hours. To help in estimating the traffic. “We are getting data from aggregators about what kind of bookings there will be for the tech park, or how vehicles will move from Silk Board to Marathahalli. From all major technology parks, we are able to understand the number of cars in the parking lot at 2 pm. We have been able to understand the exit from these tech parks which will contribute 70% to the traffic load,” he said.