Jan. 09--Last month, Robert Barron, a newly named auxiliary bishop in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, posted an intriguing essay in which he compared Waze to God.
Waze is a popular smartphone app that gives drivers turn-by-turn directions from point A to point B, and uses crowdsourced GPS data to guide them around obstacles and help them change course.
"We have been provided a Voice and instructed to follow it," wrote Barron, a Chicagoan who headed the Mundelein Seminary until Pope Francis appointed him bishop and moved him to Los Angeles. "Does it often, indeed typically, seem counterintuitive to us? Absolutely. Do we as a matter of course ignore it, presuming that we know better? Sadly, yes ...
"When you get lost or perhaps decide that you know better than the navigator, she doesn't upbraid you or compel you to return to the route she had originally chosen," he wrote, referring to the optional voice instructions. "She calmly recalculates and determines the best way to get to your goal given the choice you have made."
To put a fine point on it, Barron concluded, "As we have learned to trust the mechanical voices of our GPS systems in regard to the relatively trivial matter of finding our way past traffic jams, so may we learn to trust the Voice of the one who, as the Psalmist puts it, 'searches us and knows us and discerns our purpose from afar.'"
Amen.
Although I don't share Bishop Barron's belief in God, I've certainly become a fellow convert to the gospel of Waze. Ever since my epiphany in November, I log in before every car trip -- even and especially the trips I take routinely -- to see both what route the program is recommending and when it estimates I'll arrive at my destination.
I exhort acquaintances to try it with a capsule version of the following good news:
Waze, originally LinQmap, was founded in Israel in 2007 on the idea that if drivers on the road could pool their experiences in real time, they'd be able to guide one another through and around traffic jams, accidents, unexpected road closures and other obstacles, far better than centralized observation systems that feed updates on radio and TV.
Drivers with the app running on their phones become passive traffic reporters, showing how fast cars are moving at their locations. They also have the option of tapping in hazard reports to alert other drivers in the area.
The idea proved successful enough that Google gobbled up the company for $1.1 billion in 2013. Last month, USA Today reported that Waze was the "hands down" winner of a reader survey to name the most-useful app of 2015. Waze data now supplements the information given drivers on the more popular Google Maps app and is part of data-sharing programs with more than 50 municipalities and highway departments around the world.
Boston, for instance, has been partnering with Waze since October 2014. In an interview Friday, Connor McKay, a data scientist with Boston's Department of Innovation and Technology, said his city uses information from the estimated 640,000 regular users of Waze in the region to conduct instantaneous research on the effect of new signage, additional police presence and other "interventions" designed to reduce congestion.
On the fly, participating public agencies (none yet in Illinois) can now conduct traffic-pattern studies that normally take experts weeks or months to conduct. In return, they provide Waze with advance warning on road and lane closures, accident reports and other advisories useful to motorists.
The app is free, as is the data exchange with agencies. Waze's business model calls for it to make money pushing ads that "create impactful opportunities for businesses to engage with consumers on the go," as spokeswoman Meghan Kelleher put it, but, so far, I haven't found these occasional come-ons particularly intrusive.
Before departure, I choose my destination, usually from an on-screen menu of frequently or recently visited places. The app takes about 10 seconds to crunch information being uploaded at the moment by however many of our area's reported 412,000 active Waze users are on the road, and to suggest which roads to take. It then generates a map display on which my car shows up as a blue arrow.
If I'm driving to Tribune Tower, Waze usually sends me on the expressway. But on bad traffic days it diverts me to side streets for all or part of the way; Thursday it sent me via Lake Shore Drive, a suggestion I blindly obeyed and, as the way was fairly clear, did not second guess.
It alerts me to speed traps, the presence of police cars, disabled vehicles and even the occasional road kill. When these prove to be old or false alarms, I upload that report with a few taps.
How much time, if any, Waze has ever saved me I don't know. What I do know is that it's made me a much more Zen commuter, to conjure up another spiritual metaphor. Because it has never -- that I'm aware of -- steered me wrong, I'm comfortable in the belief that I'm always on the right path. I know not to succumb to the temptation to challenge its guidance with my headstrong notions of secret shortcuts. And because the app's time-of-arrival estimates are accurate to within a couple of minutes, I no longer anxiously look at the clock as I drive.
"Waze wants to be your co-pilot," said Kelleher, "like a trusted friend sitting next to you."
She insists, however, that it does not want to be your nosy neighbor and that Waze doesn't threaten your privacy because the app does not keep track of or otherwise store users' driving habits or patterns
I take her at her word but, frankly, I can't be bothered to be skeptical of such an assertion from a company owned by Google. That company already has so much of my web-browsing and email data that my life could be an open book to them if they wanted to open it. Further, my cell phone provider knows where I am every second of the day. So I'm not all that worried if Big Data knows when I usually leave for work and how I get there.
Is there something sacrilegious about this app-vangelizing ?
Will trivializing the message of scripture by comparing it to smartphone displays that discreetly reveal the location of all nearby Dunkin' Donuts shops put me on the road to hell?
Perhaps. But at least I know I'll be on the fastest route.
