Hi,

I live in Northern Virginia in the Washington DC suburbs. Many of my trips take me around the DC Beltway and on other roads that have "Hot Lanes." The Hot Lanes generally operate next to the regular lanes, but being toll lanes, sometimes move faster, which is why some people use them. 

Most of the time, I don't use Hot Lanes because most of the time, they don't get me there appreciably faster and are not worth the money. There have, however, been times when I would have liked to have known how much time I could save by using them. The current system (as I understand it) treats these roads as one road, and changes the trip times based on whether I'm avoiding toll roads. The only way I've found to compare Hot Lane-versus-regular lane trip times/costs is to go into the menu>settings>navigation>avoid tolls and change the setting back and forth. That's a lot to try to do while driving. 

I can turn on "avoid tolls." Two problems with that: 1) if the regular route is going to take an hour longer (this has happened) it would be nice to know that, and 2) if I forget to turn off "avoid tolls" and then go elsewhere in the country, Waze will take me off a toll road that I would be happy to take and instead put me on city streets and/or route me miles out of the way (this has happened).  

It sure would be nice if Waze treated Hot Lanes and adjacent regular lanes as two different routes and made it easier to choose between them based on understanding the different trip times/costs. To minimize phone fiddling while driving, it would be great if there was an audible choice, e.g., "in half a mile, take the hot/express lanes for $10 to save 20 minutes." Another option I've heard suggested is to be able to set a minimum time savings or some other simple cost/benefit criteria for taking toll roads. At a minimum, for me, having the "avoid tolls" button more accessible would be helpful. 

I don't know how much of my problem applies to people in other parts of the country/world, but I've heard a lot of complaints from people in the DC area, such that they avoid using navigation apps due to this kind of lack of useful information.