UCalgary student builds traffic tool to help drivers dodge delays

Third-year software engineering student Taha Zuberi has built a website that tracks real-time road incidents, displaying the four closest traffic cameras to each as they happen in Calgary. 

He got the idea for Drive Safe Calgary after spending an extra 20 minutes rerouting to an important event when the Google Maps app didn’t warn him about a delay on his original path. 

When the only real-time traffic updates he could find were buried in the City of Calgary website and lacked a street-view component, he decided to take matters into his own hands. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, why not just build it myself?’” says Zuberi, adding he knew it could help other commuters and set him apart from other internship applicants for software engineering roles. 

Since launching in August, the site has seen more than 1,200 users across desktops and mobile phones. 

After he went on Reddit and invited people to use it, one person thanked him for creating Drive Safe, saying it helped them avoid an incident en route to their destination. 

“Because of my website, they ended up going a different way and it actually saved them about 10 minutes of time,” Zuberi says. 

Zuberi credits his Schulich School of Engineering courses, including one on full stack development, for teaching him React, the main framework he used, along with application processing interfaces (APIs) and data handling, which helped him build the tool. 

He’s already planning new features, too, like one that lets users input a starting point and destination and it shows incidents en route, or a bot that posts live updates on X. 

While Zuberi plans to pitch the software to the City for integration into its public-facing traffic-information systems, he also hopes to expand the platform to other cities, beginning with Edmonton and eventually reaching across provinces. 

Because other student projects inspired him to build Drive Safe Calgary, like an app that fosters friendship on campus and beyond, Zuberi recommends people start their own initiatives. 

“The best part about making a project ... people want to use this, people give feedback. That’s what motivated me to continue on,” says Zuberi. 

Visit the site at www.drivesafecalgary.ca. Please do not use the site while driving. Always check traffic conditions before your trip or pull over safely to view updates.