Greenway Wants To Put An End To Traffic Jams | TechCrunch

Traffic jams are annoying, but they are also responsible for extra CO2 emissions and plenty of wasted productivity. Greenway, Germany’s entry into Microsoft’s 10th Imagine Cup student technology competition in Sydney this week, wants to do nothing less than put an end to traffic jams. To do so, the three-person team has developed a mobile app, which is basically a very smart turn-by-turn navigation system, and a cloud-based routing and tracking service that ensures that drivers use streets as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the Greenway team says, its app can cut driving times during peak traffic hours by half. What’s cool about the service isn’t the impressive underlying technology, though, but also the team’s innovative business model.

Here is how Greenway is tackling this problem: most of the time, drivers choose the most direct route between two points and because of this, traffic tends to converge on a small number of roads, making traffic jams inevitable.

What would happen, though, if you could route cars more efficiently and have them use underutilized roads? To find out, the team developed an algorithm that constantly monitors where cars are in a city and then routes them as efficiently as possible, keeping in mind where all the other cars are as well. The team built a number of impressive traffic simulations to validate its approach. In addition, it’s also running a small pilot project in Germany right now that has already validated the team’s approach.