Idea: Dubai Traffic Monitoring Website

I have always liked the idea of GPS based traffic monitoring system. You can use it to plan your trip, generate the route, and find out which roads are congested. The system is in effect in major cities of the western world.

However, in Dubai, we have to see this implemented. Traffic is one of the biggest problems of Dubai, and it would be nice to have some kind of traffic monitoring system that could alert the travelers of traffic conditions on their route.

So I got this idea of traffic monitoring system that does not use GPS.

Here is how it works. The engine of the website is a web based application with records of all major highways of Dubai. The users can subscribe to one or more highways and get updated through email or SMS (or other notification menthods) whenever there is status update on one of their subscribed highways. The status is updated by users who pas through those highways, again through SMS or instant message or any other technology available. So the idea is to create a system driven entirely by users.

Revenue can be generated through advertisement, and nominal subscription fees (around $10 a month or so). The motivation for users to send updates to the system is that since the system depends on user feedback, if no one sends updates no one will get updates. There can be also incentives for users who send more than 100 updates in a month will get 1 month free subscription, or something like that.

These are just rough ideas that came in my mind. I am sure a more refined system can be created based on these ideas.

Currently I don’t have the resources to develop this system, and I don’t know if I ever will. So I present this idea to the world and see if it gets implemented. Feel free to steel my idea and work on it. It will only make me glad to see it in effect.