My name is Conrad Cormier and I work in IBM Shenzhen, CHINA. We all know that monitoring traffic is already happening and will need to become more efficient to prevent congestions and accidents. But what everyone is focusing on is how cars, buses and trains can move faster and more efficiently. Another aspect that is just as important is the information available to passengers. Imagine a passenger on his way to work is waiting for his bus, which comes every 20 minutes on a normal day. If one bus breaks down and causes the wait to be 20 minutes longer, he will only know this after a frustrating additional 20-minute wait. This is a common occurrence in heavy-traffic cities. Having known about this delay he could have chosen an alternate bus route and in the end avoid a loss of time. The solution: a network to monitor location and status of city buses. Linking this to the city’s mass transit website(with live updates every minute or so) for easy access by commuters with Internet capable phones would allow them to see the proximity of each bus and therefore reduce waiting time. A similar kind of monitoring and updating is being done in airports and train stations which people use much less than public buses in mega cities. This system would allow a city to save several minutes for thousands upon thousands of citizens. This WILL happen. Let’s see is IBM catches the opportunity to lead this innovation.

Conrad M Cormier, conradc@cn.ibm.com, Shenzhen, CHINA

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