This year, let Waze be your personal travel planner so you can keep that holiday spirit alive (as well as your sanity...) For many of us, this festive time of year brings visions of sugar plums, yes, but also of unrelenting traffic en route to the airport, in between last-minute holiday shopping errands (no judgement!), during grocery stops, and while trying to make it to Christmas dinner on time. In the spirit of more sleigh bells and less stress, we’re here to share some Waze feature tips and key insights from Christmas Eve last year, including:
Last-minute shopping trends
The busiest travel times to and from airports
The most popular Christmas dinner restaurant destinations and last minute grocery shopping trends
So you can compare and contrast, we also dove into how Christmas Eve shopping trends differed by region. According to our analysis, folks in the US made the most last-minute shopping trips on Christmas Eve (better late than never, right?) with a 38% increase in navigations, followed by Canada with a 27% increase. The most buttoned-up bunch we analyzed were Mexico Wazers, who made 40% less shopping navigations on Christmas eve than on a typical December day.
When it comes to Christmas Eve grocery runs, Canadians made the most last-minute drives to the store, with 92% more navigations than usual (followed by UK and US Wazers, with 77% and 74% increases, respectively). On the other end of the spectrum were our Wazers in France, who appear to have planned their holiday feasts and stocked-up in advance, with a smaller 9% increase in Christmas Eve grocery trips.
The holiday cheer doesn’t stop there. We’re here to help make it easier – and more fun – to check off your last-minute holiday gift list, too. (Drumroll, please)...our Waze Merchandise Store is officially live in the US! Go ahead and stock up on Waze gear like ultra-soft, classic logo tees and car docks to keep you and your lucky friends and loved ones driving in safe, hands-free style (more fun items, and international shipping, coming soon!).
Thanks again for joining the Waze Carpoolmovement and helping out your fellow commuters headed in the same direction. Here’s to a greener commute, meeting new people, and saving some dough while we’re at it.
So, ready to learn more? Here’s a quick rundown of how Waze Carpool works:
Then, wait for your next Carpool match...and do it again!
Hey there, riders! Thanks again for joining the Waze Carpool movement and taking the first step in making your daily commute convenient, affordable, and fun.
So, wondering where to start? Here’s a quick rundown of how Waze Carpool works:
See you out there! Cheers,
The Waze Carpool Team
Please note: Waze Carpool is currently available in Israel and the San Francisco Bay area.
It’s time to give your commute a hilarious jump-start: your favorite Top Gear dudes—Clarkson, Hammond and May—are your newest celebrity navigation guides in the Waze app! What could go wrong? We’re celebrating their new Amazon Original series The Grand Tour, where they school us all on the amazing world of automobiles (and crack us up along the way)! Join in on the fun by selecting them as your new voice setting in Waze through February 5. Join the Grand Tour! Download the free Waze app for iOS or Android to access the voice at www.waze.com/get. Then head to Settings > Sound > Voice Language > Clarkson, Hammond & May. Here’s what you can expect from The Grand Tour (now available on Amazon Prime):
Thanksgiving week is here, Wazers! Or, as we like to call it, #WazeGiving. It’s one of of the busiest driving periods all year: AAA projects 48.7 million Americans will journey 50 miles or more from home this year. Waze is here to help you combat turkey-related traffic so you can spend more time cozied on the couch with leftover stuffing and less time stressed behind the wheel during last-minute grocery runs. Thanks to tried-and-true data and navigation insights based on last year’s app usage, we bring you our 2016 Thanksgiving Week Driving Forecast, which will help you predict the best and worst times to drive:
And this year, we’re breaking it down even further to arm you with feature tips (like Planned Drives) and tricks that’ll help you Waze like a pro and further outsmart T-day traffic...all week long:
Happy WazeGiving week! Good luck out there, enjoy your feast and family time, and stay safe on the road.
Tote bags, promo codes, excuses to binge on fast-food between scouring stores to find the right gift for everyone on your holiday list. Black Friday is upon us.
Can you guess which locales were hottest on this popular shopping day last year, across categories like fashion, home, department stores, restaurants, and sporting goods? If not, don’t stress – Waze analyzed the behavior of millions of drivers across the US to bring you the scoop so you can plan your day accordingly (or decide to stay cozy and eat leftovers at home). Tip: click image for a full picture
Which retailer did Wazers flock to most on Black Friday last year? Walmart wins, with 85% more navigations to the store than on a typical Friday in November.
Also of note: midnight through 2PM timeframe saw the greatest increase in navigation to retail, department store, and sporting good stores, with a significant drop-off in traffic after 2PM (compared to an average Friday in November). The only exception here is fashion retailers, who drove normal November traffic to their doors after 2PM. Drives to restaurants and fast-food joints peaked at noon and 6PM, when most Black Friday shoppers chose to break for a meal.
Speaking of dining...Waze also did a city-by-city analysis, breaking down 20 metros across the US to see which cities are home to the most Black Friday restaurant-goers. Despite all of the Thanksgiving leftovers, the frenzy of Black Friday shopping meant plenty of Wazers made trips to popular eateries like McDonald’s, Chik-fil-A, Panera Bread, In-N-Out, and Chipotle (increasing the overall number of restaurant navigations nationwide vs. a typical November Friday).
See if your city made the list, and how it stacked up:
We’ll leave you with a Waze pro tip: picking up a shopping buddy? Making stops at multiple retailers? Remember to use add a stop to your drive to make sure you’re taking the most optimal route to your destinations of choice.
Happy Black Friday to all! Drive safe (and smart) out there. WAZE. OUTSMARTING TRAFFIC, TOGETHER.
The Waze Connected Citizens Program is a free, two-way data exchange that empowers municipalities to harness real-time driver insights to improve congestion and make better-informed planning decisions. Since the program’s October 2014 launch, Waze has hosted an annual, in-person partner summit to facilitate cooperation between Connected Citizens Program Partners, engage in candid, forward-thinking conversations, and share best practices. This year’s Connected Citizens Program Summit was held in Paris, France, on October 26 - 27.
In our second installment of the Waze Connected Citizens Program summit behind-the-scenes Q&A, we continue our conversation with Paige Fitzgerald, Head of New Business Development – Data Acquisition at Waze; Lia Lazar and Adam Fried, both New Business Development Managers at Waze; and Meghan Kelleher, Waze Communications Manager. This time, our chat turns to the future of “smart cities.” Cheers!
Photo credit: Françoise Tancré
Q: What are the major opportunities for cities coming out of the summit? How can cities work to become “smart cities” through the Waze Connected Citizens Program, and evolving in their work over time?
Paige: To reference a quote said by a previous head of the Google Chauffeur project: if cities want to prepare for autonomous vehicles, the best thing they can do now is establish data sharing with private sector entities like the Waze Connected Citizens Program. There’s a lot that goes into the data-sharing process: cities first must identify where the data lives, take that data and digitize it (often from stacks and stacks of paper!), then aggregate fragmented data streams in one place, turning it into a sharable format for internal use (like our CIFS version 2) before they can share it with private-sector entities.
Establishing basic data-sharing procedures now and taking advantage of all the resources that are already available is the best way for governments to prepare for the influx of new data that will come with the Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles. By incorporating data into their daily operations and analyzing it to help inform decisions, they’ll be well ahead of where they’d be by simply relying on anecdotal evidence or more antiquated ways of collecting information, such as by collecting surveys every ten years, for example.
Q: How would you talk to a future partner or a struggling city about how they can go about adopting a mindset of open collaboration, and how to find the resources necessary for success?
Lia: Another important element that really sets our annual summit apart is that we have Waze Map Editors who attend as well. This year, we had several present, which creates an opportunity for increased collaboration between partners and their local community editors. For example, during the CicLAvia event in Los Angeles, two Map Editors were actually in an the LA traffic management center, helping with real-time closures. That led to a number of partner requests for introductions to their local community Map Editors, who can be an excellent resource – especially to cities that are understaffed.
Q: Has it been a challenge for government organizations to feel comfortable inviting the community into such an open dialogue? Or does it ever feel like a conflict of interest on the government’s side?
Adam: Partners want to meet citizens where they are, and so many of them are using Waze. This means that Waze ends up becoming a “megaphone” to reach citizens and receive feedback directly from them, which is a huge asset of the program: it’s a two-way communication channel that we’re able to open up, allowing partners to reach their citizens and community directly.
In a world that’s transitioning to connected and autonomous vehicles, the Connected Citizens Program acts as a bridge for partners, allowing them to transform they way they operate from reactive to proactive. They’re now able to leverage real-time insights to determine how to set up their infrastructure moving forward, solve congestion, and ultimately increase driver satisfaction. That’s what this program is all about.
Photo credit: Françoise Tancré
Q: What could help make the Connected Citizens Program stronger? What’s on your wish list for partners, future partners, and Waze?
Paige: One major thing that came out of the summit was to find a way for Waze to share some of the analytics and storage burden, allowing partners to be able to leverage a central analytics database or platform to help them gain insights from their local data.
Third: many partners also asked for an “SOS” help button within the app, which is something we can work with the Product team on to determine whether we can make the case for some of the feature requests that partners think would be most useful to drivers in their area. This is a significant point, because it means we’re bringing expert transportation leaders from around the world into conversation and collaboration with our Waze Product Team to problem-solve on the challenges that drivers face.
Adam: The biggest thing we can ask for from our partners would be for more data and a wider variety of data types. As we start to evolve the program beyond incidents and road closures, this will open up a whole new set of data possibilities. This could range from electric vehicle charging stations to traffic signal data, weather information, and much more. In turn, Waze could provide partners with improved analytics to make our data easier to understand from day one, giving our partners a clear visualization of where they stand at a given time.
I would also love to have a visualization tool that shows different outcomes for how certain changes would impact a city’s congestion based on historical Waze data, through something like a predictive algorithm. Though this is probably a longer-term wish list item…
Lia: We’ve learned that there are some hurdles during the learning process, as partners get up to speed and familiar with the program. I’d like to see more activity on the Connected Citizens Program forum, where partners are able to rely on other partners for information and help. Now that we’re at critical mass, this will start to happen organically. The annual summit also provides an opportunity for partners to discuss challenges they’re facing in an open forum, and learn more quickly about how they can use tools and available Waze data in innovative ways.
Photo credit: Françoise Tancré
Meghan: Something that I’m hoping to see from partners isn’t actually on the technical side, but on the organizational front. I’d like our partners to help their larger organizations and entities understand why real-time and crowdsourced information is vital to the future of their cities. We need to find new ways to mitigate any governmental concerns and embrace the data mindset by building new systems, like partners like Kentucky and the City of Ghent, Belgium have done. They’ve successfully taken modern approaches and made huge waves even without having cutting-edge set-ups. Likewise, partners like Chris Lambert (KYTC) and Eric Pena (Miraflores, Lima, Peru) have tackled this by layering things like weather alerts on top of traffic information to provide a more 360 approach to a city, allowing government officials and higher-up organizations to truly grasp the value this data provides.
On the Waze side, we need a continued dialogue with our partners so what we know which Waze analytics will be most helpful in addressing their needs, and continually optimizing accordingly so that we’re sharing the information that will have the most impact on improving their cities.
I also want to highlight the importance of case studies. So many cities have major traffic events but they aren’t aware of how much scale it requires to mitigate in real time: this is something that partners can continue to learn from each other. During the City of Ghent case study, Pieter Morlion taught us: if you don’t have a system, how do you build one? This is a big learning, and one that applies to the many cities that don’t currently have systems in place. You don’t have to be a huge organization with fancy technical tools to make a system work, and some of our smaller partners are finding new resources to fill these gaps and tackle large-scale obstacles. Partners like Vitoria, for example, may not have the resources to create their own feeds, but requested external help to get these built, and were able to drive huge change as a result.
In short, it doesn’t have to be a big org with a fancy tech tools to make an impact. Smaller partners are finding new resources to fill the gaps - there’s always a way to find a solution.
