Data-driven insights on urban mobility, smart city technology, and how software is reshaping traffic management.
The Smart Cities Mission put sensors and cameras on more Indian junctions than anything before it, and traffic still got worse. Here's what I think actually went wrong, and why most of that data turned out to be nearly unusable.
Notes from onboarding a city with no traffic lights. I went in assuming Shillong barely had a traffic problem, and came back convinced this product might matter more to small, growing cities than to the big, broken ones we usually build for.
Cities monitor traffic using loops, cameras, radar, manual surveys and probe data. Here's how each method works, what it costs, and what it leaves out.
Most congested roads aren't the problem; they're backed up behind one. How software separates traffic causes from symptoms, on every road, no cameras.
Most cities track vehicle counts. Few measure the economic impact of every extra minute stuck in traffic.