Waze’s data-sharing program expands across state

An image of the Waze GPS app on a smartphone.New York Times/NYT

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation hopes a new data-sharing partnership with navigation app Waze will help drivers avoid snarled traffic.

The partnership, announced Thursday, is part of Waze’s larger data-sharing initiative, Connected Citizens Program. The program lets government agencies and municipalities share data with the Google-owned app, and vice versa.

Waze will share with the DOT anonymous traffic data on bottlenecks from individual users. The state agency will share with Waze government information about construction projects, crashes, and other delays.

In a statement, MassDOT said it plans to collect Waze data and use it to help plan future construction projects.

The city of Boston joined the program last year. It uses Waze data to improve traffic flow, ticket the city’s double-parkers, and prevent drivers from blocking intersections.

California-based Waze tracks users to provide real-time traffic updates and suggest faster routes to a destination. The company, founded in Israel, was purchased by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. for more than $1 billion in 2013.

Waze says Boston has 709,000 active monthly users who together drive more than 172 million miles each month.

Through it’s Connected Citizens Program, Waze says it has similar partnerships with 70 municipal, state, and national governments.