Gridlock Hackathon to reduce Bengaluru's traffic

May coordinate traffic better than traffic policeman who relies on his eyes, radio feed to decide

Flipkart had recently received 400 entries for Gridlock Hackathon to solve the problem of the city’s gridlocked streets. On Saturday, the e-commerce major called in the top 11 teams, who came from various backgrounds — schools, colleges, and techies — to showcase their ideas to a panel of judges, including Chief Executive Officer Binny Bansal and Commissioner of Police Abhishek Goyal. 

Of these, only three were selected by the panel. Affine Anonymous’ smart traffic light solution took the first place and by2rides, a carpooling app that put the driver rather than the riders in control, came second, while a team of two XII grade students, who proposed the idea of logging the locations of potholes using smartphones, clinched the third position.

“It seems that artificial intelligence and machine learning have a huge role in not just the e-commerce side of the world, but even to solve some commonplace problems which affect our cities,” said Utkarsh B, principal architect at Flipkart. “I being a techie, if I could think of different dimensions of technology — app, data, hardware — I think everything was covered by the teams that presented here.”

By sourcing traffic data from Google and Bing Maps, the team, Affine_Anonymous, wants to build a network of smart traffic lights that respond to bumper-to-bumper traffic at major junctions in real-time. Further, by allowing these traffic lights to correspond to each other, these could coordinate traffic flow better than any traffic policeman who relies on his eyes and radio feed to make decisions.

Atmik Ajoy and Chetan V, who are pursuing their XII grade studies, were initially apprehensive of contesting against teams of veteran techies. While using smartphones to detect the location of potholes, the duo managed to impress the judges with their idea to use the data collected to rank cities in a competition similar to the government’s Swachh Bharat initiative.

While the top three teams had the best and most feasible ideas, Police Commissioner Goyal said each of the 11 teams had ideas that could be implemented by Bengaluru’s authorities.