Estimating travel time of Dhaka city from mobile phone call detail records

Traffic jam in Dhaka city, the capital of Bangladesh and one of the most densely populated cities in the world, is one of the major problems of the commuters. The city dwellers have been experiencing intolerable traffic jam everyday. To reduce the traffic congestion, new roads have been built and new rules for vehicles in the roads have been enforced. These changes do not result in any visible improvement of the traffic condition. One major bottleneck for not being able to take appropriate measure for combating traffic jam is the inability to assess and predict the traffic condition of the road. Due to huge infrastructural cost, the city does not have facility to collect traffic data by deploying sensors. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by exploiting mobile phone call details record (CDR) data collected by mobile phone operators for billing purpose. We propose a methodology to estimate travel time between any two major locations of Dhaka city from the aggregated information of a high volume of users' mobile phone CDR data. Our experimental results on real CDR data set of 2.87 millions of users of the largest mobile operator, Grameenphone Ltd., show that we can effectively predict travel time between any two major junctions and any two minor locations of the city with an average accuracy of 87% and 76% respectively.