Waze, the free, real-time crowdsourced traffic and navigation app has announced Transport for London as its 100th global partner. The Waze Connected Citizens Programme is designed as a free data exchange, and it’s great to see Waze – used by several hundred thousand drivers in London – using TfL’s roads open data to provide its app users about traffic information on TfL’s Road Network. In the coming weeks, it will also be interesting to see how TfL will be able to use the data shared by Waze.
This type of activity is underpinned by TfL’s Open Data policy, which means that TfL provides many different data feeds that are freely available and accessed by nearly 10,000 app developers, resulting in the production of over 500 apps powered by TfL data.
Over 42% of Londoners are using apps powered by TfL. We see open data as a key enabler for serving information to those travelling in London in as relevant, timely and accurate a way as possible, and the collaboration with Waze is another great example of that.
Getting the latest traffic information direct to drivers when and where they want it is key to enabling them to avoid delays. We have a wealth of open data available, and by working with Waze and joining the global Connected Citizens programme, we can not only ensure London’s road users have the information they need to plan their journeys, but we can also draw in more data to help us manage London’s busy road network.”
Phil Young, Head of Online at TfL
Working in partnership with other organisations in the tech industry to help work with us to solve some of our challenges has been a central part of our drive for innovation. From our work with Twitter on Major Disruption Notifications and Weekend Travel Advice, to the Hackathons we run with various partners and much more, we continue to collaborate with partners to help drive great products and solutions.
We’re always on the lookout for partnerships that will help us continue our drive for innovation and customer empowerment, and we’d encourage any companies or organisations who are keen to work with us to get in touch to explore the possibilities.
To find out more about Connected Citizens visit http://waze.com/ccp. To download the free Waze app for iOS or Android, visit http://www.waze.com/get.
Is the data from Waze “Connected Citizens Programme” available to the London public so we can analyse car journey data, and look at solutions for other hyper local traffic problems in specific London boroughs? If so, how does one access this information? thanks
Hi Anthony Unfortunately the CCP data terms do not allow us to share Waze data as open data. However, the real time incident data we get from Waze is one of the top sources of traffic disruptions in our Traffic Control Centre and any incidents we don’t already have in our traffic feed that appear in Waze (and are verified) are added to our Unified API. In terms of traffic flow data, we may have some exciting news soon about new data from our own extensive traffic management infrastructure. Watch this space!