Google Maps Just Got Waze Better With This Borrowed Traffic Feature
As part of its promise to improve the incident reporting UI a few months ago, Google is finally rolling out Google Maps and Waze reports from community users across all platforms. This means users will slowly begin to see these changes on Android, iOS, Android Auto, Android Automotive, and Apple CarPlay. When available, Google stated that incident data will "come from the Maps and Waze communities, and you can even see which app a report came from."
Waze mirrored Google's statement by saying that starting with police alerts (with more data types along the way), "Google Maps will surface reports from our drivers with attribution to Waze directly in the app."
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As a user on Reddit shows in a screenshot, the Google Maps incident report card shows how "Police reported ahead" is attributed to "Waze drivers". The user then has the option to indicate if the report is still accurate or not. Note that the term "Police" comes from a recent Maps update that replaced "Speed trap" to the aforementioned noun.
This Google Maps update is huge in that it combines incident data from Maps (with 2 billion active users) and Waze (with 151 million users). The latter may have a significantly smaller userbase, but because the Waze app has mostly been centered around community engagement through things like points, likes, and conversational reporting, it arguably pulls in more reliable and frequent crowd-sourced info than its sister service.
In terms of incident reports, another area where Waze might have a leg up over Maps is that the former allows users to disable reports and notifications for each data point. Right now, no such granular controls are available to Google Maps users.
So far, the new feature seems to be trickling to the public gradually. Also unclear is what regional availability is going to be like, so stay tuned!
