Singapore, 27th March 2015 – GrabTaxi, Southeast Asia’s largest taxi-booking mobile phone app, partners with the World Bank to combat traffic congestion and improve transport safety for over 620 million residents in the region. Traffic congestion and road safety impact both the quality of life and economic opportunities available to taxi drivers and passengers in developing economies. The World Bank-GrabTaxi partnership pro-vides an award-winning, open-source data platform, OpenTraffic, at no cost to local gov-ernments in the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam to improve traffic congestion and road safety.

The World Bank-GrabTaxi partnership is being piloted with local governments in follow-ing cities in which GrabTaxi operates: Cebu, Manila, Davao City, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Through the partnership, GrabTaxi aims to empower local transportation agencies to monitor real-time traffic conditions and collect historic travel time data. As a result, governments will eventually be able to make better, evidence-based decisions that previously had been out of reach – including decisions about traffic signal timing plans, public transit provisions, roadway infrastructure needs, emergency traffic management, and travel demand management.

GrabTaxi Founder and Group CEO Anthony Tan remarks, “We are honored to partner with the World Bank on this exciting initiative to revolutionize public transport in South-east Asia. We are a social startup and this partnership will drive GrabTaxi closer towards our social mission to significantly improve the lives of our drivers and passengers- and ultimately change the way 620 million people move in Southeast Asia. Together with the World Bank and local governments, we look forward to improving road safety and traffic congestion in the cities we operate.”

The World Bank Transport & ICT Global Practice heads the Open Transport initiative to build safer, cleaner and more affordable transport systems that reduce congestion, facili-tate access to jobs and lower transport energy consumption. Technology and data man-agement is helping to better map travel patterns and users’ needs, engaging citizens and improving the quality and efficiency of transport solutions.

GrabTaxi works with the existing taxi ecosystem and governments in the 20 cities it op-erates in across 6 countries– Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore Vietnam, and Indonesia – to help taxi drivers enter the new economy by using the latest mobile tech-nologies to make taxi rides safer and more efficient than before. More than 70,000 taxi drivers have registered with GrabTaxi to meet the growing demand of more than 6.3 bookings per second; and the company estimates that one in two active taxi drivers in the region will be on the GrabTaxi network by the end of 2015.

About GrabTaxi

GrabTaxi’s mission is to revolutionize the taxi industry in Southeast Asia. Runner-up in the 2011 Harvard Business School Business Plan Contest, its core product is a taxi-dispatch service with GPS-enhancements, allowing passengers to hail the nearest taxi with extreme ease. Since its founding in 2012, over 70,000 taxi drivers use the GrabTaxi smartphone-based technologies to receive bookings in Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. With over 3.6 million downloads of the GrabTaxi mobile app around the region, GrabTaxi has become the market leader in Southeast Asia. Passengers can download the app to book taxis on their smartphones and tablets (iOS: http://bit.ly/grabtaxi-iOS, Android: http://bit.ly/grabtaxi-Android and BlackBerry: http://bit.ly/grabtaxi-Blackberry).

For more information, please visit: http://www.grabtaxi.com.

PR Contact:

Ms Lý Ngọc Trang
Assistant Marketing Manager
GrabTaxi company
Tel: 0908 044 906
Email: trang.ly@grabtaxi.com

Ms Bùi Phương Thảo
Senior PR Executive
Emerald consulting company
Tel: 093 9381837
Email: thaobtp@emerald.vn