City partners with Waze to help Calgary drivers navigate city streets safely

Waze provides drivers with information about traffic, construction, police, crashes, and other road conditions in real-time (Supplied: City of Calgary)

Calgary — The city has formed a partnership with the community-powered navigation app Waze to gather Calgary traffic and road condition data to help motorists move safely and easily thorough city streets.

The Waze app receives data points from drivers and partner agencies to provide drivers with real-time traffic maps, road alerts, weather events and driving directions.

The partnership will allow Calgary drivers and passengers to share incidents with the city's Traffic Management Centre (TMC) through the app in real-time.

In return, the TMC will give advanced notice of road construction, closures, detours and real-time traffic information from traffic cameras and road sensors to Waze.

"As a smart city, we’re always looking for opportunities to improve the services we’re delivering to Calgarians by connecting technology and data," said Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi in a release. "This exciting, no-cost partnership with Waze will provide Calgarians with real-time information, about traffic and road conditions, reducing commute times and making our roads even safer."

"Canadian cities are looking for ways to use data to improve the vital transportation services they provide," said Mike Wilson, head of Waze Canada. "We’re pleased to partner with The City of Calgary as part of the Waze for Cities Data program, and help Calgarians understand what’s happening on the roads so their drives are as worry-free as possible."

Visit waze.com/apps to download the app for free.

To learn more about the Traffic Management Centre and its partnership with Waze visit Calgary.ca/tmc.