Waze to share traffic data with transport authorities
Mapping service Waze is to make data gathered from across the UK accessible to local authorities to help them plan transport upgrades in the future.
The tech firm’s maps use crowd-sourced data from users to update on traffic conditions and other live information about road congestion.
The company has announced it will make its Waze for Cities Data available on the Google Cloud Platform for 12 initial partners in the UK.
That includes transport authorities covering the West Midlands, Oxfordshire, Essex, Greater Manchester, Leeds, Middlesbrough and London.
The anonymous data, which has been collected since April this year, will enable authorities to review and analyse transport patterns, using that information to help with traffic planning in the future.
Dani Simons, head of public sector partnerships at Waze, said: “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 analyse it and be able to put it to use to improve their streets.
“We are thrilled to provide this integration with Google Cloud that will make it even easier for our Waze for Cities partners to more seamlessly organise, store, interpret and share transportation data and insights.”
Anne Shaw, director for network resilience at Transport for West Midlands said: “Waze for Cities’ integration with Google Cloud has enabled us to access a vital amount of information about our local road network.
“Consistent across a wide area, we’re able to trace issues on the road along with other points of the network, like looking at the performance of traffic lights or the conditions of a certain road.
“The free data has helped us revolutionise our transport monitoring and co-ordination systems working within our wider transport partnership with transport authorities and operators.”
