Mumbai Traffic Videos
Characteristic Features of Indian Traffic
The Indian traffic has some distinctive features, which are not seen in traffic of most developed countries. Please see videos
chaos1 and
chaos2 which are shot while travelling in an auto-rickshaw on a congested road. It brings out almost all the typical characteristics of chaotic traffic in developing regions - non-lane based disorderly movement of vehicles, pedestrians walking among vehicles, variety of vehicles that ply on the same road and HONKS. We eleborate more on these distinctive features with example video clips below. These clips are shot in Mumbai, but similar traffic conditions prevail in other Indian cities too.
- Traffic on Indian roads does not follow lane. Videos non_lane1, non_lane2 and non_lane3 show how vehicles constantly change lane to overtake other vehicles.
- Pedestrians walk by the side of the road, even if footpaths are present. On most roads, there are neither zebra-crossings nor traffic signal time-slots to allow pedestrians to cross road. So they cross wherever they want to, whenever they get the opportunity among moving vehicles. Some examples can be found at pedestrians1, pedestrians2 and pedestrians3. Another video, pedestrians4, shows how passengers get down from bus in the middle of the road, instead of at proper bus-stop.
- Just as pedestrians use road instead of footpath, motorbikes use footpath instead of road, to move forward if the road is congested. Two examples can be found at motorbike1 and motorbike2.
- There is a wide variety of vehicles on Indian roads. Heavy vehicles like buses and trucks, light four wheeler vehicles like cars, three wheeler auto-rickshaws, two-wheeler motorbikes and bicycles ply the same road. Examples of the heterogeneous traffic can be found at variety1 and variety2
These characteristic features are responsible, to a great extent, for the excessive use of honks on Indian roads. Drivers use honks as a part of their driving protocol, to alert other drivers and pedestrians. Some examples of the excessive honking in congested traffic can be found at
honks1,
honks2,
honks3 and
honks4. Examples of honking in free-flowing traffic can be found at
honks5. Even in
honks6, a video taken from the terrace of a 20 storeyed building, the honks on the road are clearly audible.
Videos from Deployment
We have developed an acoustic sensing based congestion detection technique and also implemented it on a prototype hardware. This section provides video clips from locations where we deployed our prototype.
Spatial Variation in Traffic
To see whether our technique works in a wide variety of roads, we deployed our prototype at six different Mumbai roads. Two sample videos from each deployment location, one showing congested traffic and the other showing free-flow, are listed below.
Temporal Variation in Traffic
To see whether our technique is able to detect the temporal variations in traffic state on a road, we deployed our prototype for six days, Dec1-Dec3 and Dec6-Dec8, 2010, at Bhandup. On Dec1, we remained at the deployment location from 10:30am-12:30pm and again from 4:00pm-9:30pm. Video clips, taken at 30 mins interval on that day, are listed below. Traffic state 'F' signifies free-flowing traffic and 'C' signifies congested traffic.
External Links
In this section we list some more videos of Mumbai traffic, not taken by us, but available on the youtube. These are
youtube1,
youtube2,
youtube3,
youtube4,
youtube5,
youtube6,
youtube7,
youtube8,
youtube9,
youtube10 and
youtube11. Some blogs written on Mumbai traffic can be found at
blog1,
blog2,
blog3,
blog4 and
blog5.
Audio Data
In Nov-Dec, 2009, when we were doing the initial experiments to build the techniques for our system, we manually recorded road noises from the two Mumbai roads of Adi Shankaracharya and Hiranandani. We used n79 phones for the recording and the recorded files are in .mp4 format. To download the audio data please
click here