Everybody hates traffic and more often than not, we can be stuck in it for hours! Imagine a population of over 20 million people using the streets and drivers rolling down windows, plagued with road rage and feeling as if there is no way out of this congestion! CNN correspondent, Ben Wedeman, tweeted that: “No matter who is running [for president], #cairotraffic always wins”.
Acknowledging this, a startup company in Egypt called Bey2ollak created a phenomenal app in 2010 that would make the lives of many Egyptians so much easier. The creators of Bey2ollak elaborated on this creation by explaining how someone, somewhere is always in traffic and is thus complaining to a friend or family member. So, instead of limiting this information to a one-on-one basis, they decided to expand it to a one-on-many level of communication. The name of the app ‘Bey2ollak’ means in the Egyptian slang dialect ‘It is said..’ or ‘word on the street’ so when one person uploads information on the location of traffic (or non-traffic) then they are thus relaying this information to all the users of this app! It got more than 5K registered users on the first day and is now proud to support a whopping number of over 750k users! Can you imagine how easier their lives have become?
The creators of this application won a google-sponsored competition called ‘Ebda2’ in 2012. During the competition, Co-founder Gamal el din Sadek described the motivation for this app as such: “Bey2ollak is based on a very simple insight: that there is always someone on the street who knows how horrible [traffic] is or how well it is flowing”. Could it get any better?
Now, for the lucky population of Saudi Arabia, the app’s five year journey has extended into ‘WhyTraffic’ to alert the drivers of the two largest cities in Saudi Arabia, Jeddah and Riyad, of the oncoming traffic and how to avoid it! The application itself is built with easy to use language and is available for Blackberry, Iphone and Android users and they plan on continuing this extension so it can be utilized by a larger number of countries.
You can download this application from the official Bey2ollak website and WhyTraffic is available for download here.
If you believe that this application can make or is making your life easier, drop a smile and let us know!
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