Most of the time I do. I only use Waze when on long-haul freeways, concerned about police & other traffic issues. I usually use Apple Maps as general runabout guidance, Google Maps when really concerned about best/scenic routes, Google Earth when interested in topography.
Whenever I hear people (and I hear it a lot) saying they use Waze to avoid police, I never really understand it. Waze is all user-reported, right? It's not a radar detector. So even if 100% of drivers are Wave users and they report 100% of police waiting at speed traps, there always has to be the first Waze user to encounter that cop without warning from their app. And that 100% number is a huge assumption.
I find the more fool-proof way to avoid being pulled over for speeding is to not speed in the first place, at which point both Google Maps and Apple Maps both report any other type of traffic slowdown just as good as Waze without the annoying advertisements.
You don’t need 100% accuracy to save money using Waze. Even if they only catch 90% of speeed traps, that still saves you 90% of your speeding fines.
For you, whose speeding fines are $0, ninety percent of zero seems like a small number. But for someone who spends >$0 on speeding it is worth some money.
‘This simple method will save you 100% of your speeding tickets and you will be surprised what it is’
Spoiler it is ‘not speeding’.
I recently bought a car with cruise control (the keep-this-speed kind). It was one of the only ‘extra’ options I was interested in at all and it has been great. I know most cars have this nowadays, but I came from a car without it. I was constantly watching my speed, even though I practically never go over the speed limit I semi-subconsciously checked my speed all the time, always busy with adjusting speed, especially in the city. Now with my cruise control I just set it and forget it. It is so relaxing. On the highway it is even better. Now I can just enjoy the drive without worrying about getting speed tickets and I can focus on the road better in order to prevent me from killing anyone. I am not sure the people playing with waze’s Ads in order to be able to speed can say the same.
That's insane to my ears. Maybe it's just where I live, but speeding isn't just a fine you pay, it has legal ramifications. It's literally breaking the law. You get points on your license that causes your insurance to go up for years afterward, and after enough points, it causes your license to be taken away. It's not even unheard of for commercial drivers to be fired and not be able to get another job for as few as one or two speeding tickets.
Again, I do hear these conversations quite often but it never gets easier to hear someone talking so casually in a public forum about how little they care about being caught repeatedly breaking the law and endangering the lives of everyone else around them. I'm glad Waze has built a tool to enable that behavior.
It’s a standard practice in traffic engineering to set limits based on 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic in good conditions. That apparently tends to produce an optimal speed limit from a crash/mortality perspective, but has the side effect of criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists. That’s a shockingly high number of otherwise law-abiding people who end up being on the wrong side of the optimization.
Combine that with enforcement that is for the most part capricious and arbitrary, and I think it’s straightforward to understand how we’ve gotten to this point.
It literally does not matter what the "safe speed" of a road is or how fast "free flowing traffic" will go. We have set a social contract, this is how fast traffic should go on this road. Pedestrians trying to cross the road now can accurately judge how quickly an oncoming car will reach them. Cars trying to pull out of side streets can now accurately judge how much time they have to enter the roadway. Cars entering the freeway can now judge how quickly the car behind them is approaching. It is impossible to tell if someone is coming towards you at 35mph or 55mph until it's too late.
It's not "criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists", those 15% of motorist choose to break the law and endanger everyone else. They're not genetically predisposed to one certain speed, they choose to go faster. And with any choice, it comes with a consequence.
But go ahead, say whatever makes you feel better about yourself. Hopefully the cop understands that your free flowing otherwise law-abiding speed is just poorly optimized. Hopefully the pedestrians you hit understand that their safety is just capricious and arbitrary. Hopefully the family of the victims understand you're just being unfairly criminalized.
Or you can just drive the speed that the entire rest of society has all agreed to drive. That's how civilization works.
> It’s a standard practice in traffic engineering to set limits based on 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic in good conditions. That apparently tends to produce an optimal speed limit from a crash/mortality perspective, but has the side effect of criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists.
No, it doesn't, for several reasons, most notably:
(1) percentiles don't work that way; particularly, if everyone who would drive at or faster than the limit in its absence drove exactly at the limit in its presence, it would have no effect on the 85th percentile speed, so setting and maintaining an 85th percentile limit doesn't require any violations of the limit to occur,
(2) simple speed limit violations often are not criminal in and of themselves, so even if 15% were driving over the limit, they wouldn't be criminals.
Do you have a citation for that? It sounds plausible but I bet the real situation is more complicated.
The highway speed limit may be 70mph, say, but from an emissions point of view, for most cars the ideal speed is more like 60mph.
From a safety point of view, the ideal speed will depend largely on traffic conditions. 85mph might be fine in light traffic on a straight road in clear weather in daylight, less so in other conditions. That seems like a good argument for lowballing the speed limit (assuming that you're correct about that).
I don’t speed. I’m not cavalier about speeding and I resent you putting that on me. I am an extremely cautious driver.
I’m was just explaining to my OP the expected utility of Waze. Yes, I’m cavalier about talking about that. I don’t understand why I need to be alarmist about it for you to feel safe in this conversation.
You'd be surprised just how good the user reporting is. I took a 7-hour drive through Ohio with a friend who has a very expensive, supposedly "detects everything" radar detector. We used Waze for the entire trip, as well. During that trip, Waze spotted every single police officer. I'm not sure what was going on, but there was a cop hidden about every five to ten miles on the trip -- something I've never seen before, despite trekking through Ohio on more than a few occasions[0]. His very expensive radar missed many of the cops (maybe they weren't firing the laser? who knows). The best part, though, was when we hit the Cincinnati and his radar had to be silenced due to all of the false positives it kept throwing. There was one false positive with Waze, which was barely a false positive as it was clear the police officer had moved and there were simply two entries for the same cop.
Yes, it's fool-proof to simply "not speed" and I have Waze set up to give me speed warnings so that I avoid speeding by accident. The fact of the matter is, traffic laws are the kinds of laws that are easy to break by accident. Getting a little extra warning to pay attention, both in having a speed warning and an enforcement warning, is helpful in avoiding a costly mistake. And there are times when speeding is the safer choice. In Michigan, interstates are almost all 70 MPH (with, I'm told, some going to 80 MPH). Around cities, where acceleration/deceleration ramps are too short and for a variety of other reasons related to the design of the freeways, the speed limits are set at 55 MPH. Everyone continues to travel at 70 MPH. Aside from the concept that keeping at the same speed of traffic reduces the speed at which you are hit in an accident (70 MPH, 75 MPH collision is 5 MPH at initial impact plus whatever happens after that), the bigger problem is the aggressive drivers, many of which are simply going the expected 70 MPH (some, probably without realizing the speed limit dropped) who will jump out of your lane, cutting off the driver in the adjacent lane, then jump back in front of you, similarly failing to leave a safe distance. This lane-jumping causes at least three different opportunities for a wreck should every driver involved not be paying appropriate attention.
About a decade ago, I watched exactly how this can turn into an incredibly dangerous situation. The slow car was in the right-most lane, traveling at 55 MPH on I-94. The road had moderate traffic and the van approached the smaller car at around ... probably ... 75-80 MPH. He had a sedan behind him pretty close traveling at the same speed. The van didn't want to slow down but there was a car in the middle lane, so he accelerated and managed to get in front of a car in the middle lane by getting maybe a foot off of the bumper of the slow car and rapidly changing lanes. The car behind the van wasn't so lucky. I'm guessing he was fiddling with the radio or phone, because he didn't react fast enough (though I'm not sure if he had reacted fast enough that the accident would have been avoided). He slammed on his brakes while simultaneously attempting to dodge the smaller car by moving to the left, hitting the car that was nearly blocking the van and the small car in front of him. By the time it was over, there was a rollover (the car behind the sedan who had chosen to swerve right -- onto the shoulder -- and swerved too hard), the middle lane car was totaled and several cars were rear-ended. Luckily, nobody died (as far as I know) but a few were taken off in ambulances. The slow car had the sedan nearly in its back-seat (I'm guessing he did the instinctual thing and slammed on the brakes when he got hit, making the damage worse). I was in the left-most lane and narrowly avoided both hitting the guy in front of me and being hit from behind. We all had a helluva morning giving statements to the police.
The best advice my dad gave me when I was 15 years old and learning to drive was "accidents are caused when you do something that other drivers aren't expecting." On the freeway, other drivers are expecting that every car is traveling very near the speed of everyone else. When you're the car who is not, you're "the unexpected". The good news is, according to anecdotal accounts I have from family members who are cops, the police understand this, too, and will generally not just pick a car out of the mass of vehicles going too fast. They're specifically looking for the guy who's jumping lanes or going at a much higher rate of speed than the rest of traffic.
Incidentally, the one thing you can count on when there is a cop monitoring one of those 55 MPH areas is that right near that cop, there's going to be a lot of sudden braking. Getting an audible warning of that a half-mile before it happens -- avoiding a possible fender-bender -- is really helpful.
[0] And it wasn't just Ohio, I-75, I-275 in Michigan as well as I-94 leading all the way up to Canada were similarly crazy.
