How to analyse historical waze data?

Question

I'm trying to find a way to get historical speed data for a certain road in the UK to calculate its average speed per time of day AND the maximum speed driven by a any driver on the road between a period time. Any pointers how to do this from Waze? Thanks

Answer 1

I'm afraid Waze doesn't expose that data (understandably, as it is their core business). This excerpt from the help page should say enough:

Please note: Waze does not share any historical data with partners.

If you work for a local government or organisation, you could consider joining the Connected Citizens Program. As a partner you are able to get a data feed for a certain route and you're allowed to store that data to get historical data (as detailed on the Waze Partners Help site).

While I'm not certain about the legal status of doing this without being a partner, you could probably also start building your own historical dataset based on what Waze provides as average speed on a segment by periodically looking up the data returned when you plan a route on the Waze Live Map.

Routing requests are sent to https://www.waze.com/row-RoutingManager/routingRequest?... (see the network console of your browser for more details), but this requires some additional work managing CSRF and session cookies and providing the proper referral header. While not impossible, it's not too easy to pull off.

The response of such a routing request contains the instructions you see on the live map, but also includes things like the length of each specific segment on the route (distance), its average speed without realtime data (crossTimeWithoutRealTime) and its average speed with realtime data (crossTime). It's also possible to request the average speed for a certain time in the day, but this tends to be somewhat unreliable data.

The maximum speed is something you won't be able to find in Waze's data though, I'm afraid. I'm not even certain Waze stores that information as those statistical outliers generally aren't that interesting for navigational instructions. You could try to contact Waze for more information if you're doing a scientific study, but don't get your hopes up too much in that case as they have a small team that is constantly overwhelmed by the amount of questions they receive.