Connected Citizens Program

Millions of Waze users report hourly on traffic, road hazards, road conditions and weather. This data is aggregated and analyzed by Waze, providing you with detailed information on what’s happening on your roads by the people who drive them every day.

Sharing up-to-date information with Waze provides another means to maintain the safety of drivers in your area. Whether it’s road closures or planned construction, pushing information to Waze will ease congestion by re-routing drivers in real time and minimizing the impact of such disruptive events. Waze also provides attribution for partner-supplied data within the Waze application, a great way to showcase your involvement to your community.

Waze aims to work with partners who have additional sources of data not found within the Waze app. Waze also considers several other qualifications including geographical diversity, technical capability and eagerness to innovate.

Waze was built on the premise that we’re all in this together; the volunteer community is an integral part of our company, and it’s our responsibility to give back to citizens wherever we can. A pilot program with the city of Rio de Janeiro showed us that we can empower city and government leaders with understanding of real-time conditions while delivering actionable insight, regardless of population or location.

The Waze map evolves with every driver and data point added. CCP yields more data, giving Wazers a greater ability to circumvent road closures and traffic jams.

In order to become a member of the CCP, a partner must meet all of the following requirements:

1. be a government agency or a private road operator (although Google may make an exception to this requirement at its sole discretion in rare circumstances);
2. complete the CCP membership application and execute The Waze Traffic Data API Additional Terms OR execute Google's CCP Contract; and
3. possess real-time traffic-related data, and have all of the rights needed to provide the data to Google in compliance with the Waze Traffic Data API Additional Terms.

Partner will not submit an application for membership in the CCP unless it meets all of the above requirements.

The Waze data feed contains filtered data for the specific, monitored area including system-generated traffic jams and user-reported traffic incidents (including jams, accidents, hazards, construction, potholes, roadkill, stopped vehicles, objects on road, and missing signs).

Waze makes its data available for the partner to retrieve through a localized XML or JSON feed that is updated every two minutes. Waze additionally offers a web-interface, the Traffic View Tool, where partners have access to real-time, user-reported incidents and estimated travel time along pre-selected routes.

Partners have access to an exclusive tool for inputting road closures and surfacing major traffic events or emergencies. Partners are also invited to join a partner-only online forum that serves as a hub of collaboration and a space to discuss both strategic and operational issues.

Waze hosted a partner summit that coincided with the launch of the Connected Citizens program in October, 2014, and a second partner summit in April, 2015, in Mountain View, CA. Waze plans to continue hosting regular partner summits to facilitate cooperation between Connected Citizens Partners and to engage in candid conversations about future stages of the Connected Citizens program.

Waze’s primary goals are 1) To get Waze-reported incident data into the hands of government officials that can address the reported incident, whether it’s a five car pile-up or a pothole; and 2) To give Waze drivers the best real-time, location-based information on what’s happening on the roads.

Waze accepts data from partners in a variety of formats (in preferential order): 1) Access to a live feed API (JSON, XML or KML); 2) Data entered directly into the Waze Road Closure Tool; 3) Data entered into the Partner Closure Google Form ; 4) Emails to closures@google.com ; and 5) Any combination of the above.

Partners are encouraged to share data on road closures (both scheduled and real-time) and traffic incidents (construction, accidents etc.).

Partner data must contain, at a minimum, the following fields: 1) Coordinates; 2) Street names 3) Description, and 4) [For closures] Start and end time.

User privacy is paramount at Waze. All road closure and incident information that partners receive is publicly available and submitted in the app by Waze users. The Waze user alias of each report is never shared. All of the data Waze shares with its partners (or any entity) is in accordance with Waze's user-facing policies, including the Waze Privacy Policy. Waze will never share individual driving history or non-public user information with any partner.

Waze can consume a feed that adds closures and construction info to the map automatically. The feed needs to contain basic data including the time frame of the event, the severity of the event’s impact on traffic, the nature of the event and so forth. You can find the exact definitions here.