Everybody complains day and night about the traffic problem in Cairo. Even though, you may find official data for the number of cars in Cairo, people need to have more insights about the status of the main roads in the city by weekdays and time of the day.

Bey2ollak and Wasalny are two mobile apps that use crowdsourced data from drivers to update their users about the status of each road in the city in real time. The problem, is that none of them have an API or store the historic data for anyone to download and analyze.

Thus, Karim Ouda decided to create a script that visits Bey2ollak website every 30 minutes to scrape the data there. He then analyzed the data in order to answer the following 3 questions:

• What are the rush hours in Egypt?
• What are the worst/best routes in Cairo in terms of traffic?
• What is the traffic load across hours and in weekends?

He then published the result in the following blog post:

Context:

• Data: from bey2ollak website
• Interval: every 30 min
• Research duration: from 2/12/2011 – 30/12/2011

Conclusion

• The worst route in Cairo ( in terms of traffic ) is 6 of October bridge – both sides
• Highest point of traffic density (all days) is @ 18:30 PM
• Highest traffic density Hour (all days) is 18:00 PM
• Lowest traffic density Hour (all days) is 6:00 AM
• Highest traffic density span is from 15:00 PM to 20:00 PM
• Lowest traffic density span is from 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM
• Top day ( in terms of traffic ) is Tuesday
• Lowest day ( in terms of traffic ) is Friday
• Lowest weekday ( in terms of traffic ) is Wednesday – Friday is a weekend in Egypt

Raw Data and Charts

Karim added some charts on the blog post here. He also published the raw data in a spreadsheet here.