waze – Crowd sourced traffic reports along with navigation

I recently needed to evacuate from my home and decided to use the waze app while I was driving away and then again on my return drive after Hurricane Matthew had passed.

I have had waze installed on my mobile phone for years but since I work from home, I don’t typically use it except for longer drives.  I drove with waze for almost a thousand miles recently and I found it to be helpful for alerting me to traffic jams, vehicles beside the roadway, and law enforcement locations.  It’s available for both Apple iOS and Android devices.

I didn’t use waze for navigation, instead I used the system built into my vehicle, but I could have.  waze requires an active data connection, so at times during my drive it was searching for a cellular data connection and not able to provide me with alerts or guidance.  In this sense it will be as good as your mobile device’s network data coverage is.  I didn’t find that waze consumed a lot of data during my usage.

waze traffic alert map
waze traffic alert map

waze lets it’s users generate alerts for what they see on the road in real time, and then shares them with other waze users in that area.  If you get an alert and it’s a good one, you can give it a thumbs up in the app.  If you get an alert where there’s no reason for one, you can flag it as bad information.  This process of user interaction is how waze crowd sources some of it’s alert data.  I found that this works great on well traveled roads like Interstate and major highways, and not so good on secondary and country roads.

If you haven’t tried it out, I recommend that you do.  If you do use it, please contribute alerts, and help keep the alert data refreshed by actively liking good alerts and flagging stale or bad alerts when you can safely use your mobile device.  As you might expect, my user name on waze is edweird  Safe motoring!