In April, during his second annual State of the City address, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a data-sharing agreement with Waze, the Google-owned, Israel-based navigation service. Waze is different from most navigation apps, including Google Maps, in that it relies heavily on real-time, user-generated data. Some of this data is produced actively—a driver or passenger sees a stalled vehicle, then uses a voice command or taps a stalled-vehicle icon on the app to alert others—while other data, such as the user’s location and average speed, is gathered passively, via smartphones. The agreement will see the city provide Waze with some of the active data it collects, alerting drivers to road closures, construction, and parades, among other things. From Waze, the city will get real-time data on traffic and road conditions. Garcetti said that the partnership would mean “less congestion, better routing, and a more livable L.A.” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s head of growth, acknowledged to me that these kinds of deals can cause discomfort to the people working inside city government. “It’s exciting, but people inside are also fearful because it seems like too much work, or it seems so unknown,” she said.
Indeed, the deal promises to help the city improve some of its traffic and infrastructure systems (L.A. still uses paper to manage pothole patching, for example), but it also acknowledges Waze’s role in the complex new reality of urban traffic planning. Traditionally, traffic management has been a largely top-down process. In Los Angeles, it is coördinated in a bunker downtown, several stories below the sidewalk, where engineers stare at blinking lights representing traffic and live camera feeds of street intersections. L.A.’s sensor-and-algorithm-driven Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System is already one of the world’s most sophisticated traffic-mitigation tools, but it can only do so much to manage the city’s eternally unsophisticated gridlock. Los Angeles appears to see its partnership with Waze as an important step toward improving the bridge between its subterranean panopticon and the rest of the city still further, much like other metropolises that have struck deals with Waze under the company’s Connected Cities program.
Among the early adopters is Rio de Janeiro, whose urban command center tracks everything from accidents to hyperlocal weather conditions, pulling data from thirty departments and private companies, including Waze. “In Rio,” Eisnor said, traffic managers “were able to change the garbage routes, figure out where to install cameras, and deploy traffic personnel” because of the program. She also pointed out that Connected Cities has helped municipal workers in Washington, D.C., patch potholes within forty-eight hours of their being identified on Waze. “We’re helping reframe city planning through not just space but space and time,” she said.
Waze’s reframing of how cities are planned and run has been going on for some time, of course, and tensions have sometimes resulted. Several police departments, including those of Los Angeles and New York City, have called on the company to remove the ability to report officer sightings from the platform. In response, Waze argued, “Most users tend to drive more carefully when they believe law enforcement is nearby,” as if to point out to the police that they are all on the same team. The company no doubt wants to encourage this perspective, in part because it already relies on data from many law-enforcement agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, from which it receives road-closure and accident information that its algorithm ranks as more reliable than data sent by drivers.
L.A.’s chief technology officer, Peter Marx, told me that the city’s police force has seemed receptive to the new partnership. “Look, everybody is uncomfortable with the idea of tracking police officers,” he said. “Nobody wants to be tracked.” He added that the department is excited about the possibilities for law enforcement and public safety, especially the potential reporting of hit-and-runs, about twenty thousand of which occur in Los Angeles County each year.
Many of the public data sets that Waze is drawing from—including both C.H.P. reports and L.A’s public-works database—are already available to anyone, but formalizing the information-sharing with cities arguably lends Waze additional reach and credibility, forestalls political interference, and opens the door to deeper collaboration in the future. From cities’ perspective, working with Waze signals a recognition that, if they don’t bring the company into their planning processes, Waze and its users will reshape cities on their own. In Los Angeles, where ten per cent of the populace uses Waze, this has already been taking place.
Jesse May, a programmer in his late forties who acts as a volunteer map editor and regional coördinator for Waze, has seen firsthand the tensions that can result. May lives in Lakewood, California, an incorporated city of about eighty thousand within Los Angeles County, just north of Long Beach and south of Compton, in the vast expanse of semi-suburbia that the freeways—the 405, the 5, the 110—skirt. His commute is mercifully short, only a few minutes, so, often, when he drives, it’s just to go driving some more: he’s an enthusiast. When he speaks of navigating the vast motorways of California, it can sound almost mystical, like a transitory, numerical incantation. “You can take the 710 up to the 10, jog over to the 101 back to the 10 …” Or like the description of a battle: “Maybe, if I was in the R.V., I’d go ahead and slug it out, not go screaming up over Angeles Crest with the carpoolers.”
As a regional coördinator, May oversees thousands of Waze volunteers in seven Western states. He says that he has spent much more time than he should, late into most evenings, fiddling with Waze’s maps, which is how he and others in the community got to wondering what might happen if they flattened all of L.A.’s roads. "Flattened" refers, here, to levelling the rankings assigned to roads in the algorithmic backbones with which Waze directs motorists. Typically, highways (including L.A.’s notorious freeways) are given so much weight that, once you’re stuck on one, the app is unlikely to reroute you, or even to provide alternative paths. May and others on Waze’s community boards began thinking about what might happen if they ranked pretty much every road other than an honest-to-God highway as a minor highway. Eventually they prevailed on the company to introduce the change. “Once we started trying it out, holy smokes!” he said. If you’ve used Waze, you know the thrilling feeling of going on a crazy Mr. Toad’s Wild Reroute to beat traffic.
Those reroutes have drawn ire from some of the tonier enclaves around Los Angeles. Richard Close, the president of the homeowners' association in Sherman Oaks and an occasional Waze user (“I shouldn’t eat French fries, either,” he said on a local radio show, “but what can I do? Traffic is horrendous. So I indulge”), has said repeatedly that his neighborhood has been overrun with commuters. His aim, he says, is to reclaim formerly quiet residential streets now “invaded by people.” Close and other Angelenos have complained enough that, in the last week of April, the city councilman Paul Krekorian introduced a motion to “reduce the impact of cut-through traffic that results from use of Waze,” which might include moves like restricting the number of trips on some side roads. The “streets were never a secret meant for a select few,” Brian K. Roberts, a co-author of “L.A. Shortcuts: The Guidebook for Drivers Who Hate to Wait,” argued in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. He compared Krekorian’s demands to no-left-turn signs that were posted by residents in some neighborhoods following the release of his book in 1989, and suggested that those upset by Waze direct their efforts toward campaigning for better mass transit.
The L.A.-Waze partnership is, at least in theory, an initial step toward allowing the city’s planners and engineers to regain a healthier role in mediating the kinds of longstanding cross-town conflicts that Waze has renewed and amplified. Whether the deal will help to resolve fundamental long-term issues related to the city’s growth and inadequate infrastructure is another matter. It’s even still up for question whether improved data-sharing will improve conditions in the short run. Just a few nights ago, as I was driving south on the 101, toward home, I had Waze displayed on my dashboard-mounted phone. The app told me to take Highland, my usual exit, but I could see a line of cones up ahead, creeping into my lane. Aware of the new partnership, I trusted the app, hugging the line and waiting for the cones to part and let me through. They did not. Seeing that the exit was closed, I swerved awkwardly into the lane to my left—where I would have been, had I not been staring at my phone, which was telling me one thing, instead of the road, which told me another.
