Q4 & Tech Musing #2
Waze is the world’s largest community based traffic and navigation app. The Waze app has its unique value proposition is that the app offers a platform that allows the individual drivers to share real-time traffic and road information with each other.
While Waze users are on the road, they can report police, make traffic jams, accidents, hazards and so on at a specific location on the map, while they are facing to any of those situations. Therefore, the sharing information would be shown on the Waze map for all users. Through this sharing platform, the other drives will be taken a caution while they’re passing the same location where previously reported or start a new route to their destination. In addition, the Waze navigation function will also take these real-time traffic information as consideration to plan a route that avoids traffic jams.
The reason that makes Waze popular is that people think it changed driving. It can be considered as a problem that traffic jams occur in every huge city during the rush hours. Moreover, frequently even a local driver would not have an idea with shortcuts that can avoid the traffic. The Waze app, then here to help drivers find out the real-time road information and give suggestion to get another way.
https://www.waze.com
The Waze traffic app was purchased by google in 2013. For those of us who are amazed at the accuracy with which google maps predicts our trip time, we have the acquisition of Waze to thank. Google can better predict the amount of time it will take to reach a destination by considering traffic disturbances like accidents or lane restrictions.
ReplyDeleteThere have been some significant advances in the development and technology that aren’t mentioned in your article that I thought I would bring up. Waze used to rely on user contribution to be effective. This meant that for traffic disturbances to reported, users would have to submit a disturbance via their app. This meant that for disturbances to be accurately reported, many users would have to input disturbances while they were driving. Since fatalities from accidents hit an all-time high in the past year, legislation is being put into place to limit the use of phones while driving. Not only does this lead to problems in reporting disturbances, but it means that formerly reported disturbances are not taken down in adequate time, and are often inaccurate.
So how did google solve this problem of user reliability? They decided to track you. In accepting the google maps terms and conditions, you allow google to collect location information about you. Using your smart phones GPS, google records how long it takes you to get from one destination to another, no matter if your maps app is open or not, and plugs this data into an algorithm to figure out exactly how long it will take each particular google user to get to their destination. It considers factors like time of day, your driving habits, weather, and most importantly real time data from millions of other smart phone users. This fact may be shocking to most, but I embrace it with open arms, since I know it comes with more reliable and accurate trip predictions than we have ever enjoyed.