Hello, cyclist of 20 years. I road my first half century in 2005 on a mountain bike. In 2006, I bought my first road bike. I love people getting out on bikes and having a good time. Yet I also heavily modify my cycling (than just staying in the bike lane) to deal with dumb drivers who learned different road 'rules' (in order to have not been hit by a moving car in the 2 decades I have been riding for).

I would like to share my concerns with this PR announcement made today 10 Nov 2026 on instagram (with the help of Garmin’s API).

https://www.instagram.com/p/DfkCtnDFbk8/

Sharing exact pins of where a nearby cyclist is; might be about good intentions. However it is ALSO implying to drivers where cyclists ARE NOT on the road (by the absent of any pins). What I mean by this is Waze is telling drivers to be complacent that they are on a stretch of road that doesnt have any cyclists. Scary? You should be scared.

I have been navigating without any GPS for years and will continue to do so. The average cyclist around me might have a basic bike computer but how many actually are broadcasting their GPS location? 1%? 0.001%? Yes you might encourage other companies to share GPS locations but you will never have full picture of how many cyclists are on the road at a given moment.

Rather than sharing pins: ONLY share that a car is driving along a popular cycling road (based on time of day, day of the week.) At 01:00am, there likely will be no cyclists; but Saturday morning at 09:00am, there will be cyclists on that same stretch of road. Communicate that to drivers (they are in a high concentration of cyclists 'on their route there is an significant increase of cyclists’).

Now lets talk about cyclist physical safety from bad actors. I purposefully don’t transmit my GPS location or use public/private facing route information. I am not trying to establish patterns of life and protecting myself against a company from being hacked. Road rage is usually not premeditated but the individual(s) who bring pellet guns and drive around to find cyclists are looking for trouble. Either group, the Waze app will enable to be more persistent and more violent towards cyclist. (I assume this last cases of violence are even more remote of a chance but Waze is making it easier to track someone.) (I have had one experiencing where I had evade an enrage motorist. Cutting quickly through neighbourhoods and taking pedestrian only paths to make myself scarce. This is within the states. I also know someone who has been shot at with a pellet gun. I consider both of these instances to be in affluent neighbourhoods and quite safe to navigate under normal conditions.)

Please do not open yourself to being weaponised or increasing risk to cyclists. Unfortunately federal regulations usually happen AFTER dead bodies have been piling up. Instead think carefully about what you are actually doing here.