Thirteen deaths since 2014, nine in the last three years alone. These are the agents who mark accidents on the shoulder, who repair barriers at 11 p.m. in the rain, who secure a vehicle immobilized with cars brushing by at 110. Invisible jobs until the tragedy. The Ministry of Transport ended up turning to Waze, 17 million users in France, as many potential windshields.
An orange van on the screen, a beep, and that’s it
Nothing spectacular about the device, to tell the truth. The agent boards with a tablet. As soon as he is in intervention, he activates a report. On Waze, approaching drivers see a pictogram, an orange van, in the Bison Futé spirit, and if the area is on their route, an additional sound signal. When the team leaves, the alert turns off manually. No residue on the card two hours later.
The difference with Waze’s usual community alerts is precisely this: it does not rely on another motorist who would have had the reflex to report something. It is the agent who keeps the system up to date himself, directly.
National roads only, and then again.
Many articles on the subject quickly focus on this, but the scope is frankly limited for the moment. Only national roads, neither motorways nor departmental roads unfortunately. And even on this perimeter, we are at the beginning. The pilot phase started last summer in New Aquitaine, and for several weeks it has been the DIR Ouest, the Interdepartmental Directorate of Western Roads, which has extended the system to Brittany and the Pays de la Loire. National coverage remains the stated objective, without a specific date for achieving it.
But do the drivers who drive on these roads have Waze open? Those who make the journey every day often know the route by heart and no longer necessarily have the app active. This is the kind of limitation that partnership does not resolve.
This is not a feature, it is a state agreement
Most of the new Waze features arrive because Google decided to enrich its app. There, it’s different since it’s the ministry which knocked on the door, the state services which keep the reporting up to date, and Waze which is only the channel. It doesn’t change anything for the end user, but it says something about how institutions are starting to integrate these platforms into their operational tools.
What we don’t yet have is a balance sheet. No figures on the pilot phase in New Aquitaine have been released, neither drop in speed measured, nor avoided incident recorded. The tool exists, the mortality of agents is documented, but the link between the two remains to be demonstrated.
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