Waze Can Help Indian Road Users Mark Potholes | TechTree.com

Waze Can Help Indian Road Users Mark Potholes

The company has reportedly come up with new features that will help road users in some localities of the United States to highlight dangerous or inaccessible roads

 

Not many people would have heard of Waze in India. It is among the first in the world to launch a navigation software that works on GPS. The company, which became part of Google six years ago, is back in the news offering road users the capability of uploading bad roads made more dangerous due to snowstorms in the United States.

Originally started as a crowd-funded project by an Israeli programmer Ehud Shabtai in 2006, Waze today works as a turn-by-turn navigation information and user-submitted travel app that provides users with route details and location-dependent information over mobile network.

A report published by TechCrunch.com says the company developed features aimed to make driving safer this winter in the United States following a request from the Virginia Department of Transportation. The idea is to encourage people to report such instances of bad roads within the app and also be privy to other such reports from users thereby creating a community that also helps authorities clear snow from the road or fix it in any other fashion.

The reports can be accessed within the app’s reporting tools and Google has made it live in all the 185 countries where Waze is currently available. Which means that the app can provide such details in India too provided users start contributing their bit by marking off bad road stretches within a city and even on highways.

The company has said that it would be providing data to the local authorities in Virginia which would then be used by them to help in snow clearance activities and enhance road usability, especially during bad weather conditions.

In the past Indian cities such as Bangalore had experimented with similar crowd sourced efforts though none of it really managed to resolve the challenge. If users could check out Waze and enrich it’s content by marking out road stretches in the vicinity on a regular basis, it would not only help other users but also force the authorities to get their act together.

By the way, users of Waze would notice that the app provides other reporting options that includes road mishaps and delays related to construction activity on the roads, unlike Google Maps which merely mentions an estimated driving time without actually ascribing reasons for the cause of the delay, if any.

In the past, since Waze was acquired by Google for $966 million in 2013, it has faced some challenges, with the Federal Trade Commission even considering whether the app violated competition law though authorities later gave up the investigation as it was felt that the two apps were essentially different in their purpose.


TAGS: Waze, Google Maps, Crowdsourcing, Location mapping, Road Condition

 
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