Hi Waze team,
I’ve been using Waze for many years and genuinely appreciate the product — it just works, consistently, and that’s rare enough to be worth saying.
I wanted to share a feature idea that came to me on the road. You already have years of aggregated police report data from millions of drivers. The next logical step seems straightforward: use that historical data to surface police hotspots — locations where officers are reported frequently — as a persistent map layer, not just real-time alerts.
The practical value is clear: a driver approaching a stretch where police presence is recorded at high frequency would receive a proactive warning even before anyone has reported an active stop that day. That’s a meaningful improvement over the current model, which depends entirely on someone reporting in real time.
A few thoughts on how this could work:
The threshold could be something like “reported at least X times in the past 12 months within a 100m radius” — you’d know better what the data supports. The layer could be optional (opt-in in settings) so it doesn’t clutter the map for users who don’t want it. It wouldn’t replace live reports — it would complement them.
On the data side, there’s also a marketing angle worth considering: a public, interactive heatmap showing the most common police enforcement spots by region could generate significant organic traffic and press coverage. People would check it for their commute area, share it, come back to it. You already have the data — publishing a curated version of it isn’t a big lift, and the attention it would drive seems worth it.
One honest caveat I’d flag: once drivers know a hotspot is pre-flagged, they may report active stops there less often, assuming the app already has it covered. Worth factoring into how the feature is communicated — probably framing it as “historically frequent” rather than “currently active” would keep reporting behavior intact.
Anyway — thought it was worth sending. Keep up the good work.
Thomas
Hi Waze team,
I’ve been using Waze for many years and genuinely appreciate the product — it just works, consistently, and that’s rare enough to be worth saying.
I wanted to share a feature idea that came to me on the road. You already have years of aggregated police report data from millions of drivers. The next logical step seems straightforward: use that historical data to surface police hotspots — locations where officers are reported frequently — as a persistent map layer, not just real-time alerts.
The practical value is clear: a driver approaching a stretch where police presence is recorded at high frequency would receive a proactive warning even before anyone has reported an active stop that day. That’s a meaningful improvement over the current model, which depends entirely on someone reporting in real time.
A few thoughts on how this could work:
The threshold could be something like “reported at least X times in the past 12 months within a 100m radius” — you’d know better what the data supports. The layer could be optional (opt-in in settings) so it doesn’t clutter the map for users who don’t want it. It wouldn’t replace live reports — it would complement them.
On the data side, there’s also a marketing angle worth considering: a public, interactive heatmap showing the most common police enforcement spots by region could generate significant organic traffic and press coverage. People would check it for their commute area, share it, come back to it. You already have the data — publishing a curated version of it isn’t a big lift, and the attention it would drive seems worth it.
One honest caveat I’d flag: once drivers know a hotspot is pre-flagged, they may report active stops there less often, assuming the app already has it covered. Worth factoring into how the feature is communicated — probably framing it as “historically frequent” rather than “currently active” would keep reporting behavior intact.
Anyway — thought it was worth sending. Keep up the good work.
Thomas