Highlights from the Waze Alerts User Community
Compiled SDC Crowdsourced Traffic Data on Traffic Jams, Hazardous Roadside Parking, Crashes, and Reported Road Closures
Volpe developed a COVID-19 Waze Traffic Alert Dashboard in March 2020 to track relative changes in weekly traffic jam alerts for all U.S. metropolitan areas. SDC enabled the team to leverage existing crowdsourced traffic incident activity, and rapidly developed dashboard using existing code. The team has continued to provide weekly updates through 2022. The Waze dashboard provides a rapid indicator of traffic jams covering all U.S. metropolitan areas, increasing accessibility to state, metropolitan, and county-level time trends. This ongoing project aims to enhance the dashboards for broader use by U.S. DOT.
Adirondack hot spots and daily trends
Waze alerts showed how traffic jams, crashes, and hazardous parking fluctuated through the Adirondack park’s main road during hiking days. These informed options for a shuttle route, planned to start in summer 2022.
Regional crash monitoring
Waze alerts are providing crash analyses to 31 parks in the Inter-Mountain Region. Waze can supplement current NPS crash data, or in cases where NPS crash data is not available, Waze can act as the major source of crash trends.
Mount Rainier entrance congestion
Waze alerts are giving information about how popular park entrances fill up and create traffic jams. These can be related to the gateway communities and roadways used to enter the park from visitor home locations (e.g. Seattle, Portland, Spokane).