Advertisment

Innovative solutions to Bangalore's traffic woes emerge from Flipkart's Gridlock hackathon

author-image
CIOL Writers
New Update
traffic

Bangalore's traffic woes are world renowned, to say the least. India's Silicon Valley may be producing startups faster than how traffic moves on its roads. It was to fix this problem that homegrown e-commerce startup, Flipkart announced Gridlock Hackathon on June 7 as part of the Month of Innovation at Flipkart, which, in turn, is part of its 10-year anniversary celebrations.

Advertisment

The contest witnessed close to 3,000 registrations from over 1,000 teams including entries from Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Accenture, E&Y, Ola Cabs, Microsoft, and Uber. In the end, top eleven teams, from various backgrounds- schools, colleges, and techies- got to pitch their ideas to the final jury on last Saturday. Finally, three teams were selected based on parameters like impact, feasibility, scalability, sustainability, and completeness.

The top spot was grabbed by Affine Anonymous’ smart traffic light solution based on real-time traffic feeds from Google and Bing MapsVision. Their core idea is to create a network of self-learning and communicating traffic signal nodes, which will help optimize traffic on the entire network.

by2rides, that came in second is an inverse-Uber model for carpooling that put the driver rather than the riders in control.

A team of two class 12th students- Atmik Ajoy and Chetan V, clinched the third position for their 'Road Smoothness Detector' which is an Android app that helps grade roads. The app detects and locates obstructions on the roads such as potholes, humps and many other such aspects that degrade road quality.

Let's hope that all these efforts prove fruitful in the future and they help Bangalore get rid of its traffic conundrum.

flipkart