In Estonia, electric vehicles are legally permitted to use public transport lanes. However, Waze currently appears to calculate routes and ETAs without taking this EV-specific access privilege into account.

This can result not only in inaccurate ETAs, but also in Waze selecting a suboptimal route for an EV.

A real example from my daily commute in Tallinn:

I often have two main route options to my workplace — Paldiski maantee and Tammsaare tee. Both are major arterial roads, but Paldiski maantee has public transport lanes, while Tammsaare tee does not.

For a conventional car, current traffic conditions may make Tammsaare tee appear faster. For an EV driver, however, Paldiski maantee can be significantly faster because an EV can legally use the public transport lane and bypass much of the congestion.

On a recent commute, Waze predicted my arrival at 8:58, while I actually arrived at 8:53. The approximately five-minute difference was largely caused by the advantage of using the public transport lane, which did not appear to be reflected in Waze’s ETA.

Suggested functionality

When a user has selected an electric vehicle in their vehicle profile, Waze should take locally applicable EV road-access privileges into account when:

• selecting the fastest route;
• calculating the ETA;
• comparing alternative routes.

In Estonia, this would mean allowing eligible EV routes to use public transport lanes and calculating their travel times accordingly.

More broadly, this could become a vehicle-aware routing functionality:

Vehicle type + local road-access rules + real-time traffic = the fastest legal route for that specific vehicle.

Waze already allows users to specify that they drive an EV, so extending this information to routing and local road-access privileges could make route selection and ETA calculations considerably more accurate for EV drivers.

This would be particularly valuable in cities such as Tallinn, where access to public transport lanes can materially change both the fastest route and actual journey time during peak-hour traffic.