Business Ideas in Romania

Antidote against Traffic Jams

• Posted by Eugen on January 5th, 2008 filed in IT & Telecommunications, Services, Tourism and travel, Transportation

Opportunity: Traffic Information Services

Sinziana wrote some time ago about traffic jams and recommended bikes as a potential solution. That is an ecologic and smart suggestion for Bucharest, but still… some time will pass until this idea will be put into practice. Are there any other possibilities to get rid of this traffic headache?

In the USA or some European countries, for instance, there are special services (like Tom Tom Service) providing up-to-date information about the situation on the roads of the cities. You can subscribe to this service for a fee and you receive a “road report” on your GPS or cell phone via radio frequency. This report tells you about potential car accidents, glazed frost on highways, traffic jams, asphalting work, scheduled road closures etc. so that the driver could avoid these locations in proper time.

The companies providing this service obtain the traffic information from the departments of transportation, police and emergency services, road sensors, traffic cameras etc. To use this service, simply program your destination coordinates via the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the application provides up-to-date map and traffic information at intervals of 5 to 10 minutes. For those who don’t have a GPS, the solution is communicating with the provider via a cell phone with Bluetooth. The primary benefits: time and safety. If you are using the traffic information along with a navigation system, you’ll get help for alternate routes. So you don’t have to wait for the local radio stations to deliver their scheduled traffic reports, only to find that you are heading straight towards a traffic jam.

Road safety becomes more and more important, companies from various economic sectors cooperate to create and develop such services, like the EU funded Highway Project, where representatives from the automotive industry, geo-spatial players or telecommunication operators are partners in this original pioneering type of service. This project is at an initial phase of testing in Finland and Italy, but the results are pretty successful so far.

As the number of total cars in Bucharest is growing year by year, creating huge amounts of chaos on the streets at certain hours of the day, the importance of Traffic Information Services becomes more and more critical. All we can do is hope that the technical possibilities of the Romanian companies will reach the level of implementation and that the municipality will get interested in assisting this kind of project.