Source: Flickr CC

If you find traffic jams in Costa Rica exasperating, you may not want to drive in Rio de Janeiro, ever. This magnificent and populous Brazilian megacity is among the most beautiful in the world, but gridlock has been tarnishing Rio’s facade; particularly after news media reported on the horrible traffic conditions during the FIFA World Cup earlier this year as well as during the visit by Pope Francis in 2013.

When Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes learned that Pope Francis would visit his beloved city, he immediately set out to design a plan to avoid gridlock disaster. One of his ideas was to reach out to install the Waze Application Programming Interface (API) in the city’s traffic control center.

Waze, a mobile app acquired by Google from an Israeli development firm, has enjoyed tremendous grassroots success by employing social media to improve mapping and traffic conditions. The Waze success owes a lot to Costa Rica, where users have been more than enthusiastic in adopting the app to maximum advantage. As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star:

Noam Bardin (CEO of Waze) recently sat down with Ellen Lee of the San Francisco Chronicle to discuss the app: “users in places like Costa Rica have been actively mapping out the entire country themselves, just so that they can give others drivers access to Waze. It’s really incredible.”

Before Waze was integrated with traffic control operations in Rio, the city had almost given up on installing traffic control devices such as sensors and cameras because scalability costs were getting out of hand. Urban planners and city officials are now breathing easier since Waze users in Rio are now engaged in providing real-time reports on road and traffic conditions. As a result, therte are now 80 Brazilian cities interested in using Waze and its Connected Citizens program.

In Costa Rica, Waze was officially adopted by the Ministry of Transport and Public Works after seeing the amazing feats of cartography achieved by everyday users, such as mapping the intricate and unmarked networks of alamedas (small boulevards) in the Hatillo communities.

Source: TICBeat