How Waze Works With Local Governments To Clear The Roads
The mapping app's growing Connected Citizens Program is using data to tackle congestion around the world.
Clockwise from bottom left: Waze's Di-Ann Eisnor, Thais Blumenthal de Moraes, head of Carpool strategy Kate Balingit, and program lead Rebecca Resnick are taking the pain out of urban driving. [Photo: Jennifer Hueston]
By J.J. McCorvey 1 minute Read
Waze is fighting for U.S. drivers—who waste an average of 42 hours in traffic every year, along with $1,400 in fuel and time—by looking beyond them.
Google's crowdsourced mapping app, known for tapping data from its 90 million users to inform drivers of traffic accidents and road closures in real time, now delivers this information, along with insights on traffic patterns and infrastructure problems, directly to municipal governments via its growing Connected Citizens Program (CCP). "Our goal," says program head Thais Blumenthal de Moraes, "is to eliminate traffic."
CCP launched in 2014 but made a huge leap forward last year when it signed more than 500 partners, reaching 2 billion citizens worldwide. That includes Atlanta, which used Waze last March to disentangle a gnarly traffic jam following a bridge fire, and São Paulo, which relied on CCP to respond to 5,000 reports of broken traffic lights around the sprawling metropolis. The program also works with emergency-services agencies; in the midst of last year's wildfires in Southern California, the national Environmental Systems Research Institute's Disaster Response Program published a guide to help motorists avoid compromised roads. It was updated every two minutes with new data from Waze.
The company is further tackling congestion with Waze Carpool, a ride-sharing program that was piloted in Israel and San Francisco then expanded throughout California and to Texas, where it was especially helpful in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Carpool matches commuters traveling on similar routes so they can take advantage of HOV lanes and split gas costs, with each rider paying through the app. "2017 was the year we shed our navigation-app skin and became a transportation company," says Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze's head of growth. Carpool is widely seen as Google's first viable play for the transportation market—and proof that for Waze, fewer drivers doesn't have to mean fewer users.
Waze is No. 28 on the 2018 World's Most Innovative Companies list. Check out all 50 companies here.
A version of this article appeared in the March/April 2018 issue of Fast Company magazine.
J.J. McCorvey is a staff writer for Fast Company, where he covers business and technology.
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