Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Now that schools have opened after the summer holidays, traffic in Bangalore got a lot worse. Hard it may be to believe, but yes, there’s always room in Bangalore for traffic to get worse. It’s the usual set of reasons: parents changing their departure time to align with the bus time, others dropping their kids at school on the way to work, the roads near every school getting jammed by school buses… For the very junior classes, many schools start off by having very short days initially to let them acclimatize gradually. As a result, one of my friends complained that he’d dropped his daughter at 9:15, caught the bus to work, and found that by the time he reached office at 11:30, his kid was back home. Her (school) day was over before our guy had even reached office! In the evening, I told my daughter that kids, including her , were adding to the traffic jams and commute time. Never one to back off from a round of verbal jousting, she immediately asked what I was complaining a

Google just bought Waze, the company that developed an app that warns you about traffic jams and suggests diversions to take. In case you were wondering how that is any different (or better) than what you might hear on the good old radio, then these lines by Jeff Jarvis should help understand: “ A long-ago colleague of mine said his rule was to go wherever the radio traffic reports said there was a jam because (a) by the time they found out about it, the jam was gone and (b) every other idiot was listening to the radio and avoiding that spot themselves.” So how does a phone app like Waze address these two problems? Well, Waze solves the first problem – delay in identifying jams – by collecting data from all those smartphones in real time and then inferring where the jam is. How? If lots of people on a route slow down or barely appear to move (stop and go traffic), then the Waze servers infer there must be a jam. And warn the others to take alternative routes. Since your mov