All over the world exist roads that are open or closed for various types of vehicles. Think touringcars and cabs, ambulances and trucks. Think high-occupancy-lanes, zero-emission-zones.

To implement this feature roads should get a list of allowed / disallowed vehicle types (default: all). Once roads get a maximum speed set, they might have different maximum speed for eg. trucks. Clients should get a possibility to select current vehicle type (default: car). This should influence the roads to use, the max speed to expect, overall traveltime.

Maybe special vehicle types could have special capabilities in Waze, like "delivery-car" that would suppress the creation of traffic-alerts, because every few hundred meters it has to stop for 5 minutes. Or like "road-slug" which could show itself to the waze-community as a moving hazard. Or like "double-decker-bus" that would avoid overpasses lower than 4.5 meters and high-speed lanes. Ok, I admit, these are somehow exotic examples. But you get the picture.

The benefit of this scheme is that Waze gains a lot of attraction for professional drivers; these people are on the road all day, not just during your commute. They are the ones that could benefit tremendously, and because they are many and they drive a lot, their presence on Waze could mean a big push towards overall acceptance. If a part of the taxidrivers in my town could find Waze useful and use it, there would always be 10-20 waze-icons crawling on that map. Alas, we have many roads here in downtown that are dedicated for taxis and buses, and as Waze does not distinguish those, it has lost out.

One more thing about cabdrivers using Waze: the ones I know and spoke about it do not need Waze for navigation - they have the "Knowledge". But they would want to use it if it helps avoiding ever-changing traffic conditions - and to help in that Waze must project a road that they can *agree* with. If Waze avoids taxilanes and calculates unnecessary deviations, they can not agree - even if it does everything else right.

It has been noticed before that the Waze-community is divided between editors and drivers; editors being the users that earn most of their points by editing, drivers are those that earn most of their points behind the steeringwheel.

Currently, the scoreboard seems to be dominated by drivers - the topnotch of these are probably truckers, spending their live on the road, driving maybe thousands km per week, making up to 20.000 pts. There is nothing wrong with that, we NEED drivers, and I do not want to suggest that they do not earn their points.

But for editors these are hard times... you can spend, concentrated, hours per day doing all your good work for the Waze-community and still find you are outsmarted by someone who is earning his points as a sideeffect of the job he is doing - not a chance to win there, ever, because the scoreboard only shows the total of points gained by driving AND editing.

It could be an incentive for editors if there were a league for editors - that is, a scoreboard for the points gained by editing. That would make it possible to compare your editingefforts with those of other editors, rather than guessing where other users points come from.

I guess it also works the other way around, if drivers had their own scoreboard, they could compare to drivers.

And, come to think of it, there are also some points that can be gained in maintaining the forum. We could have a third league for that, too.

And ofcourse the current league should not be changed - an overall scoreboard like we have it now could still be justified.

To make competition even more fair, there could exist different leagues for countries WITH and WITHOUT a basemap, as a basemap changes the rules of the game completely.

Please add following option for reporting:

Hazard -> Weather -> Ice On Road - REALLY important in my country

Hazard -> Weather -> Flooded Road - also REALLY important

Hazard -> On road -> Road Closed ahead - this could be abused, so should be discussed in function

Hazard -> On road -> Dangerous Curve - most are marked by road signs but driver could choose to get extra warning from Waze! for example it would really help when visibility is poor!!

Hazard -> On road -> Dangerous Intersection - maybe Black Point (a point where a lot of accidents happen, so driver should be extra careful)

Police -> Mobile speed cams - REALLY important because very often users junk up map by reporting mobile speed cams as SpeedCams witch stay there forever..

Police -> Mobile Speed Cams often seen here

Police -> Police often seen here - popular enforcement point

Camera -> Red Light and Speed combined camera

While waze does show upcoming traffic condition on one's route it does not provide facility to automatically re-route the traveler around traffic congestion using surface streets or alternate highway/freeway.

This is essential to optimizing waypoint ordering/priority:

http://waze.uservoice.com/forums/59223-client-how-can-we-improve-waze-on-your-phone-/suggestions/2360018-navigation-waypoints

This ought be available in other-than a binary toggle (yes or no). While yes and no are suitable broad options, waze ought provider finer grained control of re-routing as it does now (faster or shorter). These should include

(1) time windows

(2) zones / areas

(3) specific roads / highways / freeways

(4) density of other Wazers

(5) using either / both wazer data and federal/state in-road traffic monitoring

(6) "only into green"

(7) sheeple mode

(1)
define one's own rush-hours

(2)
One ought be able to specify whitelist- and/or blacklist areas in which waze performs congestion re-routing

(4)
only if density greater than X

(6)
If traffic is indicated in green elsewhere then waze may re-route me there. Otherwise waze may route me into any color traffic that is faster than where I am currently.

(7)
follow the faster herd of wazers

I was driving from Las Vegas, NV to Fullerton, CA this past weekend. During the trip, I had a few hours to think of what client upgrades could be implemented into WAZE. Specifically, as the title of this thread suggests, I thought about Voice Recognition. This came about as I sent a report, but was unable to type a comment, thanks to texting and driving dangers.

Here is what I was thinking:
Voice Recognition would always be active while WAZE is active. Instead of pushing a button to activate Waze, what if a keyword was programmed to start the functionality. In this Example, the keyword is “WAZE.” Whenever the driver says this keyword, WAZE listens for the next word that is associated with the program. In the situation below, this is what it would be like to report a Police Trap.

In the simplest form:
“WAZE, Report, Police, Send.”

With Comment:
“WAZE, Report, Police, Comment, Hiding behind the tree, Send.”

Of course, after Report, this could be done with any of the report descriptions in the list. Consider also "Drive To" could be implemented into the system.