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African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

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11–20 of 35 posts

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#13
post #2

Interesting as long as you don't ignore a whole demographic (e.g. very poor people without phones).

The population of Cote d'Ivoire is 20 million, Orange have released data from 5 million customers nationwide and they are one of 6 mobile phone operators. That suggests that mobile penetration is quite high in Cote d'Ivoire. Go to Abidjan and you'd see empirical evidence to support this theory too.

Cote d'Ivoire is a comparatively prosperous country in West Africa.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#14

Is anyone else slightly annoyed that there is no imagery to show this data on a map? That's all I was actually looking for when I clicked the link. Had a quick look for it and can't see anything. Can anyone else help with a link for the lazy?

The paper is being released later this week by the look of it.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#15

Why not "Ivory Coast Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data" ? As someone living in an African country I find this headline beyond ridiculous. If this was in Lebanon would we be reading "Asian Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data"?

Same way with many news sources America is the USA.

Or Vilnius is Europe, yet St. Petersburg isn't.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#16
post #2

Interesting as long as you don't ignore a whole demographic (e.g. very poor people without phones).

Welcome to the 21st century. Cell phones are a dirt-cheap commodity, not a luxury.

If you can't afford a second-hand feature phone, you likely can't afford to ride the bus.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#17

Why not "Ivory Coast Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data" ? As someone living in an African country I find this headline beyond ridiculous. If this was in Lebanon would we be reading "Asian Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data"?

Because the headline is written according to the expected understanding of the American reader.

"Ivory Coast" is about as descriptive to an American audience as "Africa". I would be shocked if more than a tiny minority of Americans could tell you where the Ivory Coast was outside of "Africa", and I bet many wouldn't even know to place it in Africa, thinking maybe it's in India or SE Asia or something.

It's written like that because Americans don't know and don't really care about African geography.

>If this was in Lebanon would we be reading "Asian Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data"?

We'd probably see "Middle-East", the understood name for that region. We might even see "Lebanon" since its close to Israel and Americans like to feel involved in that scene.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#18
post #17

Why not "Ivory Coast Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data" ? As someone living in an African country I find this headline beyond ridiculous. If this was in Lebanon would we be reading "Asian Bus Routes Redrawn using Cell-Phone Data"?

Because the headline is written according to the expected understanding of the American reader. "Ivory Coast" is about as descriptive to an American audience as "Africa". I would be shocked if more than a tiny minority of Americans could tell you where the Ivory Coast was outside of "Africa", and I bet many wouldn't even know to place it in Africa, thinking maybe it's in India or SE Asia or something. It's written li…

>Because the headline is written according to the expected understanding of the American reader.

Not exactly a high bar it seems...

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#19
post #5

They talk about 10% time reduction(probably average). Does anybody know more fine grained statistics ?

Hi, I'm from the IBM Research team who worked on this. The reduction is in total system-wide journey times in passenger-minutes (travel time + expected waiting time). The model makes underlying assumptions on how people arrive at stops to do their trips, and how they choose paths through the network. The wait times are therefore related to frequency of services. The statistic is also broken down by each route what ha…

Based on the research, how different is the proposed more-efficient bus routes from the already existing bus routes?

Or more to the point, how correct (or incorrect) were the urban planners in their choice of bus routes?

More information like how large the bus route system had grown since its inception -- for example did it grow organically over time in small growth spurts or was it in larger controlled route expansions/reductions -- would be useful as well.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#20
post #5

They talk about 10% time reduction(probably average). Does anybody know more fine grained statistics ?

Hi, I'm from the IBM Research team who worked on this. The reduction is in total system-wide journey times in passenger-minutes (travel time + expected waiting time). The model makes underlying assumptions on how people arrive at stops to do their trips, and how they choose paths through the network. The wait times are therefore related to frequency of services. The statistic is also broken down by each route what ha…

Thanks. Really interesting work.

Are you allowed to share some of the data ? If so:

Does the time includes time to walk to bus station or an estimate?

Is there some histogram of time saved per passenger ? or even something like X% of passengers save a big amount of time ?

Do you have a way to estimate time save by adding routes or alternative transport(like jitneys) before making the change?

Those are interesting, but i also think if some of this data was available(like for example big time saving for some part of the population), this would have better media coverage.

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