Waze is integrating its city data with Google Cloud to allow for cities to more easily access, organize, store, interpret, and share its transportation data.
Waze for City Data, formerly known as the Connected Citizens Program, was created in 2014 and has since attained 1,000 global partners, including the City of Toronto, City of Winnipeg (who replaced its traffic helicopter with Waze for City Data), City of Montreal, 407 ETR, and many other regions, cities, townships, counties, and ministries across Canada.
The program allows Waze partners to access crowdsourced traffic data from Waze users for the purposes of reviewing and analyzing traffic patterns. Now with Google Cloud tools – like Data Studio and BigQuery – available to its users, that data can be used to create visualizations without the need to bring in outside tools.
The program allows Waze partners to access crowdsourced traffic data from Waze users for the purposes of reviewing and analyzing traffic patterns. Source: Waze.
“Waze for Cities Data partners will no longer need to build their own tools or have different systems for different data sources. The integration with Google Cloud will make it easy to view Waze for Cities Data and layer in other transportation-related data sources to see the full picture of mobility trends in one place,” explained Sudhir Hasbe, Director, Product Management at Google Cloud.
The data collected by cities nowadays goes beyond simply anticipating traffic congestion, indicated Dani Simons, head of public sector partnerships at Waze.
“Waze has been a pioneer in sharing data with cities and working with them to improve infrastructure and fight traffic. But over the past five years, the landscape has changed. Cities have more data than ever, but they want better tools to analyze it and be able to put it to use to improve their streets,” said Simons in a press release.