It’s happened to almost all of us. You’re driving on Lower Wacker Drive when all of a sudden, your GPS (or your Uber’s GPS) loses signal and you don’t know which way to go in the dark underground tunnels.
But a new partnership between the city of Chicago and tech companies SpotHero and Google-owned Waze hopes to solve the problem with Waze Beacons, Bluetooth-enabled connectivity devices that send signals to drivers' cellphones that allow them access to GPS if they are using the Waze app.
The Chicago Department of Transportation started installing more than 400 of them on Monday, said Elan Mosbacher, the senior vice president of strategy and operations at SpotHero. The installation is slated to be completed by Thursday and to be fully functioning on Monday, Sept. 3.
"This collaboration will help drivers in our city experience seamless navigation through Chicago's five miles of multi-level and underground roads," Mosbacher said at an event Wednesday afternoon where the companies announced the partnership.
The beacons, which Waze says don’t collect data on drivers, will give connectivity to drivers not just on Lower Wacker Drive, but also on Lower Columbus Drive and Lower Michigan Avenue.
The concept for the Waze Beacons originates from an incident when Waze engineer Gil Disatnik lost GPS signal driving through a Boston tunnel and consequently missed a turn to the airport. He then launched the Beacon program in 2016 and now more than 3,000 of the devices have been installed on 46 miles of tunnels and roadways worldwide in Boston, Pittsburgh, Brazil and France.
SpotHero, the Chicago parking platform that has raised $57.5 million in venture capital funding, bought the Waze Beacons for about $15,000 and donated them to the city, said SpotHero founder and CEO Mark Lawrence in an interview with Chicago Inno. The new beacons will help SpotHero solve a particular pain point in their business.
The tech company lists several parking spots on its platform that are only accessible by the underground roads, and many of their users were having a hard time finding them because their GPS would stop working.
"We've gotten tens of thousands of people that were unable to even park because their GPS didn't work underground," Lawrence said. "So the partnership is awesome because it solves the problem for us, but also for anybody, whether you use SpotHero or not."
