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Shanghai has deployed its first bus routes guided by Alibaba’s artificial intelligence technology in an effort to beat traffic congestion and commuter fatigue.

Commuters can buy a bus ticket via Alipay, the mobile payments service run by Ant Financial, and then AI algorithms produced by Alibaba crunch the data and generate the number of buses needed and optimal route for the No 9 service between Songjiang district and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park.

As China’s biggest cities draw in more urban dwellers, traffic congestion has become a national problem – both in terms of working hours lost on the roads and impact on the environment. Shanghai was ranked as the eighth worst city in China for traffic jams in 2018, according to a ranking compiled by amap.com and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, with a resident’s average commuting time calculated at 85.27 minutes per day.

Traffic congestion between Songjiang district and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park during peak hours is extremely heavy, according to a Xinhua news report, which says employees at the science park often crowd the same route in private cars.

“Cities today need to develop by coordinating different mechanisms. A city is actually ‘alive’ and has its own life, and like any lives, it needs a brain to coordinate all the parts,” said Wang Jiao, chairman of Alibaba’s technology committee in an interview last year. “Cities need to deploy new infrastructure to drive sustainable development … City Brain is aimed at providing cities around the world with some of this new infrastructure.”

China is pushing the adoption of smart city infrastructure as it ramps up competition in AI technology with the US, and in 2017 over 500 cities applied to introduce AI technologies in transport, security and finance, according to Xinhua news.

City Brain helps to coordinate traffic management systems, including traffic lights. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, cities that use these kind of smart transport systems can reduce commuter travel times by around 15 to 20 per cent on average by 2025.

City Brain is already in place in several cities in Asia. In Hangzhou, one of the busiest cities in China and home to Alibaba’s headquarters, implementation of City Brain in 2016 helped it improve from fifth worst to 57th in terms of traffic congestion. In Malaysia, Alibaba teamed with Kuala Lumpur to implement City Brain last year.

Article originally published at https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3027880/shanghai-commuters-can-now-beat-jams-and-design-their-own-bus-routes

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