Waze is a popular navigation app used by millions of users worldwide. One of its standout features is a crowd-sourced incident reporting system, which now even ties into Google Maps. The built-in disruptions and incidents feature lets users add warnings about accidents, closed lanes, ongoing construction, traffic jams and other road hazards to the map.
The goal is to use this crowdsourced incident reporting system to warn other drivers so they can adjust their routes accordingly. The Volpe Center for Transportation Research even uses the same data from Waze to predict crashes and deploy emergency responders. Well, it seems rash drivers have found another way to use these alerts. According to research by the University of the Sunshine Coast, this live alert system is now used to drop information about the presence of the police on the map, so that other drivers can slow down and quickly avoid it in time.
Well, that was not the intention!
“The drivers didn’t slow down because of the speed limit. They slowed down because their phone told them there were police ahead,” said Dr. Levi Anderson, a research associate at the institute. Apparently, Waze users drop information about the presence of law enforcement officers on the map, and the same is seen by fast drivers to slow down only in these areas.
The researchers observed this behavior across 33 spots in the Southeast Queensland area, and found that these crowdsourced police alerts appeared on the map within 14 minutes of a law enforcement officer walking down the street to take speed measurements. “This effect also increased with speed, with the largest speed changes recorded on motorways, especially during roadworks,” said Dr. Anderson added.
In areas where the speed limit hovered around 100 km/h (about 62 miles per hour), the proportion of speeding drivers dropped from 62% to 12% once a police presence alert on the map was shared by a Waze user. Although a crowdsourced incident reporting system is beneficial on the surface, the UniSC expert argues that these alerts “are a long-term disadvantage for road safety, as drivers are encouraged to speed when the app does not warn them about the police in advance.”
According to the National Safety Council, speed is a “major” factor behind deaths and traffic injuries, accounting for over 11,000 deaths and a whopping 29% of all victims in 2024. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology and is free to access.