Recently I downloaded an app that was supposed to help me find people to carpool with. I'm not someone who relishes the idea of coordinating with strangers for my commute but, still, I wanted to give it a shot. For two weeks, I asked drivers—many of whom, the app indicated, had signed up but never actually accepted any carpool requests—for rides between my home in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood and my office South of Market. When that failed, I tried to use the app to get to Silicon Valley. Nope. Then within Silicon Valley. Crickets. Finally, one morning I got a notification that someone named Krishna was offering to give me a ride. By the time I navigated into the app, Krishna's request had disappeared.

This unfortunate performance wouldn't have been surprising if this app were the work of an obscure startup. But it's actually an attempt by a navigation giant to find a new way of fulfilling its founding mission. The giant: Waze. Its mission: To vanquish traffic.

Waze chalked up my experience to, among other things, the enormity of the task it had set for itself. “Getting people to carpool is HARD,” Waze spokesperson Terry Wei replied when I emailed her about it. “It's asking people to change their routine and behavior.” It's also, in a funny way, an attempt to recapture some of Waze's initial success.

When Waze launched in 2009, what distinguished the Tel Aviv startup from its peers was that it aimed to crowdsource its digital maps rather than simply buy them. The company made a prediction that CEO Noam Bardin says got his team “laughed out the door by every industry expert”: It wagered that every smartphone would soon have a GPS chip and that every car would have a smartphone-toting person inside. And the people in those cars, Waze believed, would be eager to use those new tools to collaborate and do great things for the world—for free!

In exchange for streams of personal location data provided by those very GPS chips, Waze users would receive up-to-date info on traffic. Ultimately, they would also get access to the company's complex routing algorithms—traffic models that tell you when to leave here to get to there, and which roads to take. But there was a hitch: First Waze had to persuade people to sign up. The product would work only if Waze could collect data on billions and billions of miles of road. Which is why Bardin has joked about something called Tim Cook Day.

On September 28, 2012—a day of infamy in the world of online cartography—the Apple CEO posted a rare public apology for the state of his company's newest venture, Maps. The app was notoriously buggy and riddled with inaccuracies. Cook wrote that Apple was working to make it better. But in the meantime, he suggested, people should go ahead and use some of Apple Maps' rivals, including a three-year-old company called Waze.

More than 20 million people had downloaded Waze's app at that point, but Cook's name-drop gave the company's user numbers a shot in the arm. In 2013, Waze was acquired by Google for a reported $1.3 billion.

Today, Waze has 475 employees, 115 million monthly active users, and some 30,000 volunteer map editors. This “community,” as Waze likes to call it, throws itself into one common goal that's something between an objective and a crusade. “Traffic is a global evil,” Waze writes on its website. “Only we, the People, can get ourselves out of this mess.”