GrabTaxi, Southeast Asia ’ s largest taxi-booking mobile phone app, partners with the World Bank to combat traffic congestion and improve transport safety for over 620 million residents in the region. Traffic congestion and road safety impact both the quality of life and economic opportunities available to taxi drivers and passengers in developing economies. The World Bank-GrabTaxi partnership provides an award-winning, open-source data platform, OpenTraffic, at no cost to local governments in the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam to improve traffic congestion and road safety.
The World Bank-GrabTaxi partnership is being piloted with local governments in following cities in which GrabTaxi operates: Cebu, Manila, Davao City, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Through the partnership, GrabTaxi aims to empower local transportation agencies to monitor real-time traffic conditions and collect historic travel time data. As a result, governments will eventually be able to make better, evidence-based decisions that previously had been out of reach – including decisions about traffic signal timing plans, public transit provisions, roadway infrastructure needs, emergency traffic management, and travel demand management.
GrabTaxi Founder and Group CEO Anthony Tan remarks, “ We are honored to partner with the World Bank on this exciting initiative to revolutionize public transport in Southeast Asia. We are a social startup and this partnership will drive GrabTaxi closer towards our social mission to significantly improve the lives of our drivers and passengers- and ultimately change the way 620 million people move in Southeast Asia. Together with the World Bank and local governments, we look forward to improving road safety and traffic congestion in the cities we operate. ”
The World Bank Transport & ICT Global Practice heads the Open Transport initiative to build safer, cleaner and more affordable transport systems that reduce congestion, facilitate access to jobs and lower transport energy consumption. Technology and data management is helping to better map travel patterns and users ’ needs, engaging citizens and improving the quality and efficiency of transport solutions.
GrabTaxi works with the existing taxi ecosystem and governments in the 20 cities it operates in across 6 countries – Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore Vietnam, and Indonesia – to help taxi drivers enter the new economy by using the latest mobile technologies to make taxi rides safer and more efficient than before. More than 70,000 taxi drivers have registered with GrabTaxi to meet the growing demand of more than 6.3 bookings per second; and the company estimates that one in two active taxi drivers in the region will be on the GrabTaxi network by the end of 2015.
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