The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) and Baton Rouge City-Parish have partnered with Waze, a free real-time, crowd sourced navigation application powered by a community of drivers.

With this partnership, DOTD and City-Parish will join 65 communities across the world as global partners within the Waze Connected Citizens Program (WCCP).

The programme was set up by Waze with the objective of promoting two-way data sharing of publicly available traffic information between government agencies and citizens.

"The WCCP enables municipalities, states, and countries to get a view into real-time road traffic information that helps drivers make decisions that impact travel."

Louisiana’s DOTD and City-Parish partnership promotes safer roads for commuters.

The WCCP enables municipalities, states, and countries to get a view into real-time road traffic information that helps drivers make decisions that impact travel.

As part of this partnership, DOTD and the City-Parish will offer information about government construction works, crash and road closure data to Waze for a thorough overview of current road conditions.

Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden said: "Through this exciting partnership with Waze and our partners in traffic management at the state, we are taking the next step to adopt a data-driven approach to reducing congestion here in Baton Rouge and create safer driving conditions for all our citizens.

"Much in the same way we achieved a Top 10 Digital City ranking last year, my administration is laser-focused on how we can best utilise technology and digital platforms such as Waze to better connect with citizens and, in this case, both provide and consume real-time traffic data that works together to form one of the world’s most accurate overviews of local traffic conditions."

In the next few months, both DOTD and City-Parish plan to integrate Waze data streams into each organisation’s traffic management system and related traffic monitoring applications, such as DOTD’s 511la.org and the City-Parish’s traffic incident map.