How Waze is working with Transport for London through its Connected Citizens program, which has 900 partners, to launch the city's new Ultra Low Emission Zone
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat : Tweets: @medicalquack , @lbonesini , and @tombamonte Tweets: @medicalquack : LOL! I keep hearing on the LA news what a hassle this app has created pushing volume traffic down otherwise quiety residential streets...RT @VentureBeat: How Waze is using data pacts, beacons, and carpools to win over cities https://venturebeat.com/... Luca Bonesini / @lbonesini : “From Waze's perspective, the two-way data-sharing pacts are all about improving its navigation app, while municipalities and other organizations can improve their own infrastructure projects via Waze's traffic data” https://buff.ly/2YVVNBl pic.twitter.com/j6dvvdSCEh Thomas Bamonte / @tombamonte : Nice summary by @psawers of @Waze #ConnectedCitizens program and related efforts building mutually useful data partnerships with cities and DOTs. Most major DFW cities participating with one very large and conspicuous exception. https://venturebeat.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Waze's work with Transport for London on the Ultra Low Emission Zone is the city-data arm of a strategy it has been assembling for years: the Transport SDK it launched with six partners including Lyft and 99taxis turned driver guidance into something other apps could build on, and the Connected Citizens program — now at 900 partners — flips that into two-way pacts where municipalities get Waze's traffic data for infrastructure projects while Waze improves its navigation app.
London is the right test case for why that matters: the ULEZ launch needs a way to measure how the zone changes traffic patterns, and the same city later shows up in Waze's roadmap as a robotaxi hub, with a Waymo-Waze pilot feeding robotaxi-collected pothole data into Waze for Cities. The throughline is Waze positioning itself as the data layer between private drivers and public infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Transport for London gets real-time traffic data from Waze's user base to support the ULEZ launch, while Waze gets TfL's infrastructure and zone-boundary information to route drivers around or through the new emission zone.
Second-order effects
- The 900-partner Connected Citizens roster makes this a repeatable template: other cities weighing congestion or emissions charges can adopt the same two-way data pact rather than building their own sensing, pressuring rival navigation providers to offer municipal data deals of their own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, municipal traffic policy — emission zones, congestion pricing, road maintenance — increasingly runs on data collected by private navigation apps and, later, commercial fleets like Waymo's, making the city-data platform the contested layer between drivers, cities, and regulators.
The trend: Navigation platforms are evolving from consumer routing apps into the data infrastructure cities use to design and enforce traffic policy.