How is Waze working to save lives?

Waze is the crowdsourced, real-time traffic app that helps users make the best choices in navigating to their destinations with as little trouble as possible. But now that information could also be used to help first responders in saving citizens’ lives.

In a release on Tuesday, April 4, the European Emergency Number Association announced a data-sharing partnership with Waze in which they’ll test a pilot project for emergency response at four locations around Europe. The project will test three potential applications:

• when Waze users input an incident such as a traffic accident into the system, emergency responders will also receive that data and information;
• emergency services can then inform users about where incidents have occurred in real time; and
• emergency vehicles can navigate via Waze to avoid traffic and improve response times.