GrabTaxi ties up with World Bank

Southeast Asia’s largest taxi-booking mobile application has teamed up with the World Bank to provide data to transportation agencies across the region to help combat traffic congestion.

GrabTaxi, whose network spans 70,000 taxi cars in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia, announced the partnership with the World Bank on Tuesday, saying this would also “improve transport safety” for more than 620 million residents in the region.

The World Bank-GrabTaxi partnership is being piloted with local governments in the following cities in which GrabTaxi operates: Cebu, Manila, Davao City, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, the statement showed.

Through the partnership, GrabTaxi aims to aid local transportation agencies by allowing them 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.

“Traffic congestion and road safety impact both the quality of life and economic opportunities available to taxi drivers and passengers in developing economies,” the statement showed.

“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,” it added.

GrabTaxi works with the existing taxi ecosystem and governments in the 20 cities it operates in across six countries to help taxi drivers enter the new economy by using the latest mobile technologies to make taxi rides safer and more efficient than before.

The company estimates that one in two active taxi drivers in the region will be on the GrabTaxi network by the end of 2015.

“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,” GrabTaxi founder and group CEO Anthony Tan said in the statement.