One of the promises of big data and the internet of things is that local governments will be able to gather information about the state of their infrastructure.
A good working example of this is Google’s Waze, the Israeli traffic monitoring startup bought by the search engine giant two years ago.
Waze gathers information about traffic delays and transit times from users then aggregates them to give a picture of commuting times. It has always been a good example of how collaborative data can work.
This week Google announced the service will share its information with a handful of transit agencies and councils to improve their knowledge of the traffic choke points in their cities.
In return the agencies will give their transit information to Waze.
Waze’s story is a good example of how sensors and people, in this case smartphones and their users, are going to gather information on infrastructure and cities. The key is going to be in making sure that data isn’t locked into proprietory databases.