Now, two Indian-Americans get set to end traffic snarls

Nobody likes traffic jams. But if the startup, Urban Engines, had its way, they won’t be around for long. Founded by two Indian American professors — Balaji Prabhakar and Shiva Shivakumar — Urban Engines hopes to solve traffic jams by applying the lessons learned from managing internet traffic.

Prabhakar is a former Stanford professor and one of the world’s leading authorities on “internet congestion”.

Ditto for Shiva Shivakumar, who spent 10 years as an engineer at Google working his way up to vice president and helping build products like Gmail and AdSense.

Their idea is to watch real world traffic so cities can make changes on the f ly when they see traffic problems coming.

When a city can treat its transit systems the way Google treats its website, it can see when a traffic jam develops and take immediate steps to solve it.

Urban Engines says you can track traffic using city-issued items people are already using, like their bus and train passes. It has built a system, which it sells to cities, that collects data from these items, so they can predict traffic problems in real time.

Maybe one day, a traffic jam could become as rare as a Google outage.