The city of Los Angeles has some “traffic issues.” The social mapping traffic Waze app is used by more than 1.3 million drivers in L.A. to avoid traffic, find other routes, and report issues. The traffic situation will be hopefully improved by sharing Waze and municipal data. Under a new agreement, the city of Los Angeles will provide data to Waze including information about road closures, construction, and safety hazards to help drivers avoid blocked streets and congestion.
Mayor Garcetti announced that the city of Los Angeles will provide hit-and-run incident notifications to Waze users driving near the incident in hopes that users will provide the city with information. The Los Angeles Police Department will also use the app to send out AMBER alerts.
Waze is providing the Los Angeles with aggregated, publicly available data from the app, including user-generated reports, incident data, and aggregate traffic data, without any identifiable information. The new data stream will be used to evaluate the City’s traffic management for events and road closures, assess the deployment of traffic officers, and further refine traffic strategies for the most congested areas.
The Waze app is home to one of the world’s largest networks of drivers. The social navigation media company Waze was purchased for around $1.1 Billion by Google in 2013. It is rumored that Waze will be incorporated into Android Auto.