Waze

After doing my class presentation on the community based traffic and navigation app, I actually had the chance to try it this weekend. Going home from Chapel Hill, we hit some horrible traffic and I wanted to figure out how long we might be in it for. So, I downloaded the Waze app and signed in just to see if it was all it's cracked up to be.

It ended up being extremely helpful. It showed me the traffic I was in, and the length of it, by making the road display red until the traffic jam ended. I could tell how much farther I would have to go to get out of it. What was really great, though, was that it's set up so you can see other users on your screen, so you can tell there are people around you who are also on the app. They come up as mini cars on the road, and when you click on one, it tells you how fast they are going. So, unfortunately, I could see that up to ten miles ahead of me someone was only travelling at 4 miles per hour. It was a long ride home...but the point is that--even if the app didn't get rid of the traffic (that would be an amazing app)--it still let me know just how long I should be prepared to be in stand-still traffic. It was really cool to see notifications popping up that alerted the Waze user community to the traffic conditions and updates. It's a great way to get need-to-know information as fast as possible.