Traffic Apps Survey: Consumers Value Multi-Purpose Apps

With the growing popularity of mobile apps in a variety of industries, it should come as little to no surprise that mobile apps that monitor and alert users to traffic on the roads have broken into the mainstream. In fact, a recent report from Quartz found that about 1 in 10 drivers in Los Angeles currently use the popular traffic app Waze to avoid traffic jams in the city. And other metropolitan areas have seen increases in traffic app users as well. So just how popular are those mobile traffic apps? We asked 1,000 respondents on August 19-20 about the growing popularity of traffic apps.

Traffic Issues

In Ask Your Target Market’s latest survey, 72% of respondents said that they currently own or lease a vehicle. Of those drivers, 60% said that they find traffic to be at least somewhat of an issue when they drive. 83% said that they prefer to avoid traffic whenever possible. And 58% said that they already have a good method for avoiding traffic when they drive.

Navigation Apps

Overall, 72% of respondents said that they currently own smartphones. 21% of those smartphone owners said that they already use multiple mobile apps for maps or navigation. 48% use one such app. And 31% don’t use any map or navigation mobile apps. Google Maps was by far the most popular maps app among mobile consumers. But Apple Maps, Waze and Mapquest were also mentioned as popular options.

Traffic Apps

In addition to those mobile navigation apps, 7% of smartphone owners said that they currently use multiple different mobile apps to help them identify traffic issues or receive traffic alerts. 17% said that they use one such app. And 77% don’t use any. Google Maps was again the most popular mobile app mentioned by those who use mobile apps to identify traffic alerts, but Waze was mentioned almost as often. Apple Maps and Mapquest were also mentioned among traffic app consumers. Looking forward, 22% of those who don’t already use traffic apps said that they would be likely to use them within the next year. Those respondents who are interested in using mobile traffic apps in the future were actually more likely to say that they already have a way of avoiding traffic in some situations. They were also more likely to use map or navigation apps.

Key Takeaways

It seems like big, recognizable names are at the top of consumers’ lists of favorite traffic apps. It also probably doesn’t hurt that apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps come pre-loaded on some smartphones. But even other players like Waze, which coincidentally was purchased by Google a few years ago, can still compete with the right strategy. However, the majority of traffic and navigation app users have just one app, if any, for those purposes. So the apps that can provide both of those functions could very well appeal to a wide base of customers. And while many traffic and maps apps do already provide a version of both functions, actually positioning an app as one that does both, rather than focusing on one function over the other, could be a beneficial strategy. You can view the complete survey results in the widget below and be sure to click “Open Full Report” to take advantage of all the chart and filter options.Photo Credit: Waze W10 Event by Rene C. Nielsen under CC BY-SA 2.0What do you want to know? If you need some consumer insights on a particular topic, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it for an upcoming survey post.

Results were collected on August 19-20 via AYTM’s online survey panel.