KUALA LUMPUR (April 10): Grab is set to provide real-time traffic data to Malaysians to help reduce congestion in the country’s major cities.

Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing company is implementing its OpenTraffic smart data platform in this country — after launching it in the Philippines last year – through a tie-up with Malaysia Digital Economy Corp Sdn Bhd (MDEC).

OpenTraffic is a graphical user interface to easily query and visualize stored traffic statistics for both travel time and speed, in a map using anonymised global positioning system (GPS) data from Grab and will be available to public access by September.

Grab Malaysia’s country head Sean Goh said this platform is able to alert the government agencies in real time of the actual conditions on the ground and it will be very beneficial to all agencies.

“We want to contribute by sharing our data and working alongside local government agencies to make transport more accessible for the 620 million people in the region,” Goh said during the launch event at MDEC’s Asean Data Analytics Exchange today.

Working together with World Bank Group, this initiative provides traffic data from Grab’s GPS data streams to address traffic congestion and improve road safety in major Malaysian cities.

This platform helps to provide Malaysia’s traffic management agencies and city planners with access to an open dataset to better manage traffic flow and make decisions on local transport infrastructure.

“We maintain one of the largest datasets in the region derived from our drivers’ GPS data across Southeast Asia,” Goh said.