Bengaluru traffic and Internet routing protocol !

Disclaimer: The objective of this article is to only to demonstrate cross pollination of business models in this case ideas. Illustrate a point from my earlier blog post: Technology consulting to business consulting in five steps

 It was yet another morning trip to the airport. I live close to the southern end of Bengaluru, my home town and the airport is in the northern end of the city. Given the traffic and monsoon rains it is not a very pleasant minimum two hour journey. Being a regular traveller I am very familiar with every route to the airport, at least that’s what I thought till now!

 My taxi driver after covering few kilometres started to take a very odd route, at times driving away from the destination. Since it was a fixed price deal and we had plenty of time I decided not to question. Interestingly we reached well ahead of my regular time. While complimenting him for getting me to the airport ahead of time I commented about the strange route he took. He said he followed Google map – for most of the distance. He said he and several colleagues have come to depend on Google map as most of the arterial roads are clogged during peak hours. He also added that depending on the time of day and congestion it recommends efficient route which has worked most of the time. He also noted that most of the time like today suggested route does not involve arterial roads. That is indeed very efficient way to get around if one could dynamically change direction/route based on traffic pattern assuming one has access to traffic pattern in this case Google does thanks its users on roads.

 This is nothing new – this simple and elegant approach has worked for the internet all these years. While designing the internet which is a group a very large group of computers exchanging information the designers were faced with similar challenge. Connecting two or three or a few may be manageable how about thousands or hundreds of thousands exchange information effectively. That led to birth of a routing protocol. Protocol is nothing but standard set of rules all those who wish to participate on the internet have agreed to follow. The principle is let the traveller in this case data chose the route.

 As per this protocol, information or data is broken up to smaller pieces called data packet. Each data packet has some relevant information such as destination address, sender address etc. much like postal envelopes that contains destination address.  Each data packet is allowed to find its own route as no one knows know what lies ahead in terms of traffic. Since each packet determines its own route there by creating near infinite ways to get from point A to point B. 

 Bengaluru like most cities in India is bursting at seams as it attracts massive number of people looking for opportunities. There is only so many roads that can built in a given time duration. Traffic congestions in Bengaluru is legendary. One of the things authorities are focusing on now is strengthening few key roads to better manage the traffic congestions. Its either enhancing their capacity by expansion or easing bottlenecks by building bridges. These expanded roads or newly built bridges in no time get chocked as everyone gets on these very same roads during peak hour traffic. This a practice in almost every large city as the authorities are rushing to ease infrastructure bottlenecks.

 This is where lessons from the routing protocol can be applied. What if each vehicle could decide what is the most efficient route for itself from several alternative options. The alternative options could be inefficient in terms of distance but compensate by lesser congestion and reaching the destination faster.  Part of the investments should be routed to strengthening these alternative roads.

 From cost perspective any work on arterial roads costs more. The land if any has to be acquired costs a lot more, given the importance of the arterial roads any work is a PR nightmare and has to be completed quickly that costs a lot more. Also cost of ownership too goes up as more users are inconvenienced or travel time of more people are impacted. Hence rather than focusing all investments on arterial roads why not identify few key hot spots from which maximum to and from travel occurs and strengthen several routes? Road usage patterns from Google map will help identify these alternative routes discovered and used!  As more users move to alternative options will work as a load balancer hence resulting in dissipating the load on arterial load.

 How does one communicate availability of these options when they are available: its already being done by – Google Maps.