CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A new tool from the Ohio Department of Transportation can help alleviate the anxiety of the commute and give Ohioans a little bit more power on that daily drive to and from the office.

ODOT has launched a new app - OHGO - that provides drivers with location-based traffic alerts, construction information and delays.

Unlike social traffic apps like Waze that rely on user input to record delays and detours, OHGO has traffic operators at ODOT's 24-hour traffic management center in Columbus adding all traffic snarls to the app.

"Every single one of these is human verified by a traffic operator," said Matt Bruning, ODOT press secretary.

The app uses information from ODOT's speed sensors to determine delays, provides real-time traffic maps and gives users access to its traffic cameras along their routes.

All of that information previously was available on ODOT's desktop OHGO.com site (and to some extent the mobile site), but the department wanted to make the travel information more accessible.

"We find that a lot of people like to have something in the palm of their hand," Bruning said. "It seemed to be a natural extension."

The app is the next step on a long digital road for ODOT, which in 1998 launched its first interactive site - the Ohio Transportation Information System, or OTIS. Since then, sites like BuckeyeTraffic.org and, starting in 2013, OHGO.com, have expanded the information available to Ohio drivers as technology has advanced.

App users can preset routes - like their daily commute - into the app and schedule push notifications about traffic along those routes for specific hours. They also can set a radius around their location and receive notifications for that specified region.

"That's the whole idea of OHGO in the first place - to give travelers information before they leave for their destination so they can make decisions on how to reach that destination," Bruning said.

The OHGO app already is available in the App Store and in Google Play.