The U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) is teaming up with the navigation app Waze on a new initiative designed to make the nation’s roads safer, the agency announced Monday.
U.S. DOT is launching two pilot projects that are aimed at integrating traditional crash data with crowd-sourced traffic data that can be more quickly collected and analyzed.
The goal of the new approach is to gain better insight into how to decrease fatalities on U.S. roads, which have been climbing at historic rates in recent years. One pilot program will combine traffic crash data with Waze’s crowd-sourced data on road hazards and traffic conditions. The map app provides navigation and traffic updates by using real-time data from users. U.S. DOT will explore whether the crowd-sourced traffic data can be used as a “reliable, timely indicator” of traffic crashes and crash risk.
Under the other pilot project, U.S. DOT will analyze anonymous data from GPS-enabled devices on the prevailing operating speeds of vehicles traveling all across the nation’s highway system. The department will examine how speed interacts with other roadway characteristics to influence the likelihood of crashes. According to U.S. DOT, in 2016 there were 10,111 roadway deaths that involved speeding as a contributing factor.
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Source: The Hill
