Google Maps knows where every traffic jam in Dhaka is, has photographed most of its road signs and lamp posts, and has watched the city grow from orbit for two decades. Until now that knowledge was mostly used to route you to dinner. Google is now packaging it for the people who plan cities: three new data products from Google Maps Platform can be queried directly inside BigQuery, its cloud data warehouse, so a planner can ask questions of the map the way an accountant asks questions of a ledger.
The three products
- Imagery Insights uses Street View and aerial photography to report on the condition of physical infrastructure. Google’s example is telecom and power companies checking utility poles and road signs across a region without sending a crew to each one.
- Roads Management Insights exposes historical and current traffic data by road segment — which junctions congest, when, and how that changed after a flyover opened. Google pitches it for congestion planning, route design and emergency response.
- Places Insights aggregates information about the businesses and points of interest in an area — density of restaurants, opening hours, how busy places are — for retail and service planning.
Alongside them, data from Earth Engine, Google’s satellite analysis platform, is now reachable from BigQuery, so deforestation, fire risk, surface water and climate impacts can be measured in the same queries. Google says the aim is to help cities and organisations make evidence-based decisions about sustainable development.
What it would mean for Dhaka
Bangladesh’s planning agencies work largely from surveys that are expensive, occasional and out of date by publication. Roads Management Insights alone would let the Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority see, from years of real data, whether a U-turn scheme reduced delay or moved it; Imagery Insights could give the power distribution companies a pole-by-pole audit of Mirpur from a laptop; Earth Engine already shows, season by season, how much of the city’s wetland has been filled. The data is not free — BigQuery is billed per query and the Maps products are licensed — and Google, not the government, decides what is collected. But the alternative is not better data. It is no data, and decisions taken anyway.
Source: The Verge, via Prothom Alo.
