Boston tackles double-parking with Waze data

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Boston’s Transportation Department is using data from its partnership with Waze to relieve congestion and send bicycle cops to the city streets with the most double-parked cars.

Besides helping commuters navigate city traffic, Waze data is now helping Boston target that most annoying source of slowdowns – the double-parked car.

A team from the city’s Transportation Department, the Department of Information Technology and Boston’s New Urban Mechanics group looked at three months’ worth of citizen-reported data from Waze, Google’s crowdsourced traffic app, to find streets most likely to have double-parked and illegally-standing cars.

When the team identified those streets with the most illegal parking – around Fenway, Boston Medical Center and Longwood – additional bike-riding parking enforcement officers were deployed to those areas to get the double-parked cars to move, according to Peter Ganong, a member of the citywide analytics team.

“Double parking isn't just annoying, but it also creates congestion and potential safety concerns for cyclists and pedestrians,” said Greg Rooney, director of parking management, in a YouTube video. “It’s important just to keep traffic flowing, for public safety reasons and just for quality of life.”

The city has been sharing real-time traffic data with Waze since Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced the collaboration in February.

The partnership has allowed Boston’s more than 400,000 Waze users to see up-to-date traffic conditions like accident reports, road closures and potholes, and provided the Boston Traffic Management Center with information like traffic speed data that can be used to improve traffic signal coordination.

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