Just look around, said the members of team OTS, showing off their home city on Friday during a colorful and seemin gly dangerous bus ride to the Imagine Cup opening ceremony. “Do you see Cairo traffic,” asks Mai Medhat Galal Attia, a computer engineering student at Ain Shams University in Cairo. “We’re going to solve it.”
At its best, traffic in Cairo crawls along at a snail’s pace, with the slow moving, stop-and-go vehicles emitting massive amounts of air pollution that chokes the air of the 17 million to 25 million people who live Egypt’s largest city. “(Our air pollution) is worse than anywhere,” said Yomma Mahmoud Ibrahim Hassan.
Millions of stalled and slow moving cars create air pollution that make it difficult to breathe, members of the OTS team said, adding that the congestion makes driving or walking through the city physically dangerous. Also, an estimated 6,000 people are killed every year in car accidents in the city, Medhat said. “It’s one of the amazing things to learn how to drive here,” she said. “Traffic lights don’t work, and when they do, people don’t use them.” Also, immense amount of time and productivity is wasted when people get stuck in traffic, Ibrahim said. “Look at this traffic,” she said. “A trip that should take less than 20 minutes can last for three hours.”
After adding all that together, the all-woman team from Imagine Cup host city Cairo decided something needed to be done. Ibrahim, Medhat, Mai Wafik Ahmed Zaghloul, and Nihal Abbas Fares Mohamed decided step in and build a solution, a project called Trafficory.
“I hope to see Egypt without traffic backups,” Medhat said. “I hope we can deploy our project.”
The team has built software that uses traffic cameras (there are very few in Cairo), Global Positioning System technology, and information submitted by drivers stuck in traffic to give real time information on where the worst traffic jams are. “The route can be adjusted as you go,” she said.
The concept is to gather all the possible data and use it to publish real time on traffic conditions throughout the city. Real time traffic information would be collected from cell phones of the people that use the program. The information would then be vetted and sent back them on their phones.
It would be nice to embed sensors in the road like the United States and other countries do to measure traffic flows, but there isn’t money for that. “We’re trying to do the same thing the local way,” Medhat said.
The goal, she said, is to of course win the software design completion at Cairo, but also turn their project into a business that actually get traffic moving in their city. Alas, they didn’t advance to the software design finals, so now it’s on to trying to make their project work in real life.
“I hope we deploy 
our project,” Medhat said, explaining that the team will need support from government officials and businesses to make the project work. “We’re trying to get government approval.”
Team OTS beat out 74 teams to win Egypt’s software design competition. The team was the only all-female team to enter in Egypt’s regional Imagine Cup competition. The team worked long hours for weeks, working hard to finish the project while also studying for final exams – all four just finished their final year at university. So like many of the teams at Imagine Cup, their lives have been consumed by their project. “We don’t know anything else,” Medhat said.
-Lukas Velush
