first published week of: 10/17/2016
The interactive navigation app Waze, with its 65 million active monthly users, has partnered with Esri, which provides geographic information systems (GIS) software to 25,000 state, local and national governments. While the combination isn’t quite the vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication that will enable autonomous vehicles in the future, it is a kind of app-to-infrastructure system that improves traffic and creates more reliable maps for drivers right now.
This isn’t anything new for Waze. It’s been running the Connected Citizens Program (CCP) since 2014, a free two-way data exchange with its municipal partners. It just announced its hundredth partner recently, Transport for London, but it works with cities around the globe, from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro to Montreal.
“Esri is a leading GIS software provider,” said Adam Fried, new business development manager at Waze. “Any time we see an opportunity to augment our data, we do it.”
With so many municipalities already using Esri, it was easy to add Waze data to cities’ current mapping software. Fried said one of the biggest barriers Waze had encountered with municipalities was resource constraints — time, money and technology. Teaming up with Esri “meets our partners where they are,” Fried said, without having to invest in specialized software or training. continued…