RasteyRishtey: A social incentive system to crowdsource road traffic information in developing regions

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), used for efficient road traffic management, largely benefits from probe sensing data like GPS traces. But gathering large scale GPS traces is a bottleneck, especially in developing regions, limiting researchers and government organizations from fully exploiting this potentially rich information base. In this paper; we present RasteyRishtey¹, a social networking system, to incentivize smartphone users to gather and share their GPS traces. Our social networking application in the simplest case, aids relatives like parents and spouses to track people, given the latter´s consent. In the more complex case, groups of users can organize meet-ups collaboratively, starting from choice of venue to track everyone else until they reach the venue, using the application. Both versions produce crowd-sourced GPS traces, that can potentially be a rich source of traffic information. We present the design and implementation of the applications, along with a deployment based user study of the same. We also present some preliminary analysis of the collected GPS traces, that shows certain interesting and intuitive characteristics of road traffic, in the Indian city of Bengaluru.