Are you still worried about being scammed by taxi drivers? How would you get your belongings back when you can't tell which taxi you left them in?

Now you can turn to the Guangzhou Traffic Information Management Center (GTIMC).

With the help of GPS technology, the center can derive the track of a vehicle during a given period of time or at a certain place, and conclude whether a taxi driver takes the best route or not.

In the same light, even without passenger's knowledge of such information as the number of the taxi, which company it belongs to, the vehicle location system can find the car the passenger was riding. It facilitates one to find his property.

The rationale is simple: GPS devices are installed in over 30, 000 vehicles in the city and send their data to the GTIMC every 30 seconds. A computerized traffic information management system analyzes the data and information collected from other sources, and then tells the GTIMC what is happening on the roads.

Office of GTIMC in Guangzhou (ycwb.com)

"The system's capacity is equal to a police force of at least 200!" says Su Kui, director of the GTIMC.

Pointing to a big electric screen in the GTIMC, Su introduced how the system synthesizes all information and visualizes it. "See these green dots? They mean everything is alright, while the red ones symbolize traffic jams, and the yellow ones mean that the traffic flow is rather slow."

Moreover, the system can monitor the conditions of individual taxi as well. Whether a taxi is on service, stranded or off duty are all clearly shown on the board, according to Su.

Besides, but for this advanced system, we couldn't have discovered such irregularities, added Su. "Yesterday, we found 255 taxi drivers and their partners rotated their duties during busy hours."