Yandex Map Redirecting Traffic

By Maria Levitov

The heavily trafficked Yandex Internet portal is looking to combat congestion on Moscow’s notoriously clogged streets with a map showing which routes drivers should avoid. The map, launched Tuesday on Yandex.ru, shows the city’s major arteries. Affected roadways are highlighted red; those areas where drivers face shorter delays are labeled yellow. The map is updated every four minutes.

The map launch follows a series of government-sponsored anti-traffic measures, including the expansion of Leningradsky Prospekt and sundry park-and-ride schemes. Authorities are also planning to build the Fourth Ring Road.

But the new map is unlikely to be an elixir for a city absorbing more than 100,000 additional cars yearly. According to City Hall, there are now 3 million cars registered in Moscow.

“One of the biggest challenges we are facing in the express business today is traffic congestion, which is getting more difficult, especially in major cities like Moscow,” Garry Kemp, regional director of DHL in the CIS, said last week.

City Hall insisted there were no immediate solutions to the traffic problem because of the huge influx of new cars.

“Alleviating traffic jams is not just about building new roads,” said Maria Protsenko, a spokeswoman for the city government’s transportation and infrastructure department.

Alternative solutions include ongoing improvements in traffic lights and road signs. Also, City Hall plans next month to consider a system that would coordinate traffic lights across the city, Protsenko said.

For now, frustrated drivers who spend hours every day driving a few kilometers from their homes to their jobs can log on to Yandex. The interactive map not only pinpoints the location of traffic jams; it also tells web users when the congestion began, and it estimates how far the traffic stretches in either direction.

At 6:18 p.m. Tuesday, for instance, those logged on to the site might have discovered that there was a touch of congestion stretching four kilometers on Dmitrovskoye Shosse, from Butyrskaya Ulitsa to 3rd Nizhnelikhoborsky Prospekt. The slowdown began at around 6:15 p.m.

The real-time data comes from SMI Link, a self-described information provider that taps traffic police, taxi drivers and other sources. SMI Link was contracted by Yandex.

“We began by providing traffic information to radio stations,” SMI Linkdirector Pavel Goldin said Tuesday.

Two-and-a-half years later, the company is providing traffic reports to cell phone providers, television stations and individual subscribers. It also has television monitors at several gas stations in Moscow showing local traffic.

Unfortunately, many people are not able to log onto Yandex: Only 21 percent of the country’s adult population, or 23.8 million people, are Internet users, according to figures provided by the Public Opinion Foundation. But according to one government estimate, the number of Internet users may jump to at least 50 million by 2010.