Resumen
Nowadays, social networks have become in a communication medium widely used to disseminate any type of information. In particular, the shared information in social networks usually includes a considerable number of traffic incidents reports of specific cities. In light of this, specialized social networks have emerged for detecting and disseminating traffic incidents, differentiating from generic social networks in which a wide variety of topics are communicated. In this context, Twitter is a case in point of a generic social network in which its users often share information about traffic incidents, while Waze is a social network specialized in traffic. In this paper we present a comparative study between Waze and an intelligent approach that detects traffic incidents by analyzing publications shared in Twitter. The comparative study was carried out considering Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (CABA), Argentina, as the region of interest. The results of this work suggest that both social networks should be considered as complementary sources of information. This conclusion is based on the fact that the proportion of mutual detections, i.e. traffic incidents detected by both approaches, was considerably low since it did not exceed 6% of the cases. Moreover, the results do not show that any of the approaches tend to anticipate in time to the other one in the detection of traffic incidents.