Perth County has partnered with Waze, a free, real-time, crowdsourced traffic and navigation app.
The Connected Citizens Program, a two-way data sharing program, is powered by the world's largest community of motorists to share traffic information. The Connected Citizens Program promotes real-time road conditions for safer travelling, and involves partners around the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg.
Waze provides anonymous, Waze-generated incident, safety, and slowdown information from the source: travellers themselves.
Perth County will also provide real-time, government-reported construction and road closure data, creating one of the most concise, thorough overviews of current road conditions today.
The map evolves with each new report of hazards or potential delays.
Users can flag traffic, weather hazards, accidents and emergency vehicles to offer safety alerts for other drivers.
“We are excited about this no-cost partnership with Waze. When we implemented the Municipal 511 road closure system this summer our goal was to make closures in our system available to our communities through live feeds to systems like Waze,” says Dave Colvin, Perth County’s emergency management coordinator. “We have worked closely with our Municipal 511 provider Transnomis Solutions to make this connection, and they are working to connect with other services including Google Maps, Garmin and TomTom. The fact that this is a two-way exchange of information means that our internal Municipal 511 users also receive real-time updates from travellers.”
“Traffic is a universal problem and we commend Perth County for taking the steps to improve information on road conditions for people in this community,” says Thais Blumenthal, Connected Citizens’ program global lead. “Through the CCP program, we look forward to empowering Perth County with real-time driver insights so they can make better planning decisions and improve city infrastructure.”
For more information on Municipal 511 and the appropriate use of Waze, please visit www.perthcounty.ca/emergency. To find out more about Waze Connected Citizens Program, visit http://waze.com/ccp. To download the free Waze app for iOS or Android, visit http://www.waze.com/get.