City hosts 20 per cent of the populationResearchers from IBM have created a map of potential bus routes for the Ivory Coast’s largest city, Abidjan, using data collected from greater than 500,000 cellular phone calls.

Today, 539 buses are supplemented by 5,000 mini-buses and 11,000 taxis to take people across the city, which has a population or greater than 3.5m. The AllAboard team believes that re-designing the infrastructure around people’s movements could cut travel times within the notoriously busy city by 10 per cent.

As many phones in use within the developing world don’t have GPS functionality, the information gathered from phone calls or text messages, which register with a close-by mobile tower. The person’s movements can also be ascertained because the call is transferred to another tower or a brand new call is made near another tower.

The anoymised data from 2.5 bn calls made by 5m phone users was gathered by Orange between December 2011 and April 2012 and released to be used in its Data for Development project. Here is the most important data release of its kind, in accordance with MIT, that is hosting the NetMob conference where the remainder of the projects can be showcased.

“This represents a brand new front with a potentially large impact on improving urban transportation systems,” said Francesco Calabrese, a researcher at IBM’s research lab in Dubli and a co-author of a paper at the project. “People with cellphones can function sensors and be the building blocks of development efforts.”

David Talbot, chief correspondent on the MIT Technology Review, said: “Cell phone data promises to be a boon for lots of industries. Other research groups are using similar data sets to develop credit histories in accordance with a person’s movements and get in touch with-based transactions, to detect emerging ethnic conflicts, and to foretell where people will go after a natural disaster to higher serve them when one strikes.

“While in a lot of past studies cellphone data was used to deduce travel routes and insist, IBM says this was the primary time such data was utilized in an effort to really optimize a city transit network.”