I’ve just found this suggestion and wanted to add to the idea, particularly as this has been here for several years.
Rather than simply having a static “Horse Ahead” warning, I wonder whether Waze could develop this into a temporary, rider-activated safety alert.
A horse rider could activate the alert when setting off, with Waze automatically using their location and direction of travel. Approaching Waze users could then receive something like:
🐴 Horse & rider ahead — slow down and pass carefully
The alert could automatically expire after 10–20 minutes, or when the rider ends it.
I think the really valuable part would be giving drivers advance warning before they encounter the horse, particularly on narrow country roads, around bends or over brows where the driver may otherwise have almost no warning.
It could potentially build on Waze’s existing real-time hazard/reporting functionality and would avoid requiring the rider to continually interact with their phone.
I’d be very interested to see whether Waze could revisit this idea as a dedicated road-safety feature, particularly given how much the Waze platform has developed since this suggestion was originally posted.

A potential future development
The horse feature could eventually form part of a broader Vulnerable Road User Alert system.
Horses would be an especially useful starting point because they can be unpredictable, relatively slow-moving and particularly vulnerable to sudden encounters with vehicles.
However, the same underlying technology could potentially support other temporary vulnerable-road-user situations in the future.