This Startup Wants To Make Your Commute Shorter, Through Prizes And Data

Crunching data from smart commuter cards, Urban Engines can help cities map out where the congestion choke points are in a transportation system, and provide incentives for commuters to avoid them.

Balaji Prabhakar, a Stanford University computer scientist, was stuck in a massive traffic jam in Bangalore, when he began to think about the congestion plaguing rapidly growing cities across the world. The experience sparked an experiment he conducted with the Indian company Infosys and 20,000 of its employees in the city. Could you cut down on congestion if you gave people incentives to drive to and from work at "off-peak" hours?

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