Bartow County Joins Waze Connected Citizens Program

Sign up for the Cartersville Patch newsletter!

---

CARTERSVILLE, GA -- Bartow County recently announced that it's one of seven cities in the southeast to join a data-sharing partnership with Waze, the free navigation app powered by the world’s largest community of drivers.

Designed as a free data share of publicly-available traffic information, the Connected Citizens Program promotes greater efficiency, deeper insights and safer roads for citizens of Bartow County along with more than 55 other partners around the world.

The Waze Connected Citizens Program launched in October 2014 with ten inaugural partners, including the city of Johns Creek and the Florida Department of Transportation. In just 18 months, Waze has inked 10 partners across the southeast, including the cities of Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina and Miami Beach and Tampa in Florida.

"We are excited to have another outlet for providing planned road closure information to our community," said Steve Taylor, Bartow's sole commissioner. "We hope that by providing the public parking lot and business locations, visitors will have a better experience in our communities. We look forward to all the possibilities the Waze data gives us in terms of providing traffic streaming for public safety personnel and emergency responders."

The Waze Connected Citizens Program gives municipal leaders an unprecedented look at realtime road activity, empowering decisions that achieve concrete community impact.

Waze provides partners with real-time, anonymous, Waze-generated incident and slow-down information directly from the source: drivers themselves. In exchange, partners provide real-time government reported construction, crash and road closure data to Waze to return one of the most succinct, thorough overviews of current road conditions today

Deep technical knowledge is not required to be chosen as a Connected Citizens Program partner. It is critical that prospective partners prove their dedication to citizen engagement and commit to use Waze data to improve city efficiency, however.

Partners are also expected to measure and share their findings with other municipal organizations, developing case studies that serve as keys to a global set of improvements for collective mobility. To find out more about Connected Citizens, visit http://waze.com/ccp.

---

Image via Waze