One feature of the Google-owned navigation app Waze that I hear is very useful is its sometimes-controversial crowdsourced police alerts, which warn users when there’s a speed trap ahead. Now the app is adding a feature which your GPS from the last decade may have had: it will warn you when you’re over the speed limit.
Speed limits are complex, since they can include school zones, construction zones, and varying limits along the same highway. You might wonder what the limit is when you’ve just turned onto an unfamiliar road, and Waze will tell you if you’re speeding –– or if you’re a preset speed over the official limit, like 5 or 10 miles per hour over.
The feature has rolled out in 20 countries, which do not include the United States or Waze’s home country of Israel. They promise that support in the rest of the world is coming “soon.”
In some large cities, the app has compiled data about intersections that it considers especially dangerous, and will warn users to be especially cautious when approaching them, according to PC Magazine.
Here’s what you should remember about those speed limits, though: like must of the rest of road data within Waze, the information is crowdsourced, coming from the app’s community of users and super-users, its map editors. That means that the information is updated more often than commercial GPS apps might be, but trust it as far as you ever trust crowdsourced data.
For our international readers and people with travel planned, the countries where the feature is turned on are Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, El Salvador, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad, Tobago, and Uruguay.
Avoid Tickets and Stay Informed with New Waze Speed Limits Feature [Waze]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist