Open Traffic Incident Management System and Service
Traffic incidents, road closures, road repair work, hazards, JAM, public events on roads etc., are very common in India. They affect us every day. It will be useful information to have when planning our travels.
There are many standards for reporting, publishing, and consuming on-road incidents. Some of them are closed (like Google Maps), and some are open only as a standard (Waze), not data. Some of them publish on a platform that can’t be used, like the Bangalore Traffic Police on Twitter.
So we need a system that would be available to civilians (drivers, travelers) and authorities (Police, NHAI, Civil governments) to publish incident data. Service providers like OSMAnd Apps, routing engines like OSRM, and alerting services to consume.
Open Traffic Incident Management System and Service:
- Focused only on incidents and not on real-time traffic
- It’s an open-source product and service. It’s a web app where users (civilians or authorities) can create an account and submit incidents. If required, it can go through its own publishing flow.
- Once published, these incidents will appear in the feed
- Apps or other consumers can subscribe to the feeds and use it
- Supports one more standard for publishing the incidents. To begin publish city/state feeds in the CIFS format
Standards
- Waze CIFS - CIFS (Closure and Incident Feed Specification) is Waze’s standard protocol to describe Incidents and Road Closures in Partners’ feeds.
- Datex2
Build
Open Traffic Incident Management System and Service:
- Django web app with posgtres+postgis
- User accounts
- Publish city and state CIFS feeds
Apps: OsmAND and CoMaps etc
- P0: Write plugins, or add to the base app, the ability to subscribe to incident feeds via a URL. And show them onscreen when you are closer to them
- P1: Use them while routing if the user wants to avoid the roads with incidents (similar to avoiding tolled roads) incidents
Current status
- Design phase: I have thought through it a bit about implementation but not fully explored or spoken to any one in city government. Without their participation its useless
- I don’t know any app that can use the feed directly , but these feeds can be submitted to Waze. It will be great to have OSMAnd plugin that subscribe to a feed on the app and show it.