However, anyone who lives in Lagos knows that this isn’t the case. If I live in Ajah, and you provide a service that tells me there’s slow traffic from before Palms Shopping Center to Lekki Phase II, what exactly are my options? And being everyone knows what time rush hour is, they kill time in the vicinity and start their home commute later in the day from 9pm.
So why exactly would I pay for this? What’s the value I get from a service telling me about a traffic situation I already know will be there, and I can do nothing about? I think it’s one of those services that sounds very ingenious in implementation, but the logistics are daunting, and the consumer uptake is just not there because it’s just not needed (that much).
I would suggest that you refocus the service to something folks might actually think of paying for, like real estate listings, visual classifieds, entertainment and buzz, etc.
]]>In conjuction with them we’ll also be launching an FM RDS Traffic Management Channel service for sat nav devices in the near future.
]]>the idea of gps on taxis etc sounds workable, just gave us an idea of an additional module for Sembuse in the future. Crowdsourced and gps info would make the info more accurate.Maybe the firms that own all these billboards at roundabouts could invest in cams that allow them to monitor and they can them supply this info to interested parties, say a call center where pple would call or a traffic info service that updates route information every 5 minutes.If its a call the charge could be a one of flat fee for every call to an automated sys.
….just my thoughts
]]>1) Crowd Sourcing is on our list of items to implement. People here already crowd source information socially regualrly getting in touch with friends, family members etc to report especially bad or out of the usual patterns of traffic (major accidents etc). The key challenge for any technology solution here is to replicate that social nature of information in the electronic realm, we’ve not cracked it yet but we’re getting there.
2) GPS is something we’re looking into, there are a number of tracked fleets in Lagos and we’re actually already in discussions with a few people around using this data to log average speeds on certain roads. It’s not a complicated tehchnical challenge but it is a more complicated data sharing and access challenge.
3) In the end I suspect we will use a combination of solutions as has been sugested, GPS for speed of updates, our own network of collectors for specific incidents, data from Lagos State’s own people and we hope one day information from Lagos State’s CCTV network.
4) Yes radio stations to provide limited traffic information, much of it comes from teh Lagos State Traffic Management Authorty (LASMA) we are also in talks with them about combining their internal data with the service. Again they tend to report incidents though, not the speed of traffic, plus it just looks cool overlaid on the map and you can’t visualise on the radio.