Mobile phone data collected from millions of users has been used to re-route bus routes in Abidjan. This was done by IBM researchers.
The team looked at the digital traces left by some of Orange’s five million mobile phone users in the country. The data set included the call detail records of phone calls and SMS exchanges, with antenna-to-antenna traffic information and data relating to the movements of a subset of Orange customers over a two-week time period, with the focus on Abidjan, that has more than 500 large buses and 5,000 minibuses as well as more than 12,000 shared taxis. Every time someone uses a phone for a call or text message, that location data — referring to the nearest mobile phone mast — was collected. On the aggregate, this served to provide a fairly accurate guide to larger population movements.
“From an urban mobility perspective, cities in sub-Saharan Africa, with the exception of Lagos, have seen organised public transport deteriorate over the past few decades. The large entities have been inefficient to user’s operators and users. An ad-hoc fleet of informal operators have filled this void,” explain the authors of the study.
IBM is working on similar projects in other cities in Africa, including Accra in Ghana.
