Waze rolls out crash historical past alerts for accident-prone roads

Waze has a brand new security characteristic that launches an alert when drivers are developing on a very crash-prone part of their route. Waze’s weblog put up says the characteristic, which has been in beta since final yr, makes use of “historic crash knowledge and key details about your route” like site visitors ranges or what sort of street it’s to generate the warnings.

Seeing if a route is crash-prone means drivers might be extra alert, or that appears to be Waze’s hope. A Google assist web page says the crash historical past alerts don’t distinguish between main and minor incidents, so understanding what you’re in for — and whether or not you must think about one other route — is likely to be laborious. However alerts like this should strike a steadiness between being informative and never changing into a distraction, in order that is smart.

Waze’s head of PR, Caroline Bourdeau, clarified to The Verge in an e-mail that the warnings, that are based mostly on group alerts, don’t keep in mind whether or not automotive accidents contain different autos, pedestrians, or cyclists.

In December final yr, the corporate rolled the Waze group into Google’s Geo division, the place Google Earth, Google Maps, and Road View reside, previous to laying a few of them off a couple of months later. Waze says the characteristic is now obtainable — I see it in Waze on my iOS and Android gadgets, however you possibly can verify for it by going to Settings > Alerts & Studies > Studies.