Waze Rolling Out Railroad Crossing Alerts to More Countries

Wednesday August 12, 2020 7:11 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Google-owned navigation app Waze today announced that it is expanding railroad crossing alerts to additional countries, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, and others, according to The Verge. The safety feature quietly launched in the United States, Canada, and Belgium earlier this year.

waze railway crossing alert
Enabled by default, the alerts pop up in the Waze app when a driver is approaching a railroad crossing on a street. The feature can be disabled in Waze's in-app settings under Map display > Reports > Railroad crossing > Alert me while driving.

Waze is available for free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

In related news, Google Maps will be returning to the Apple Watch in the coming weeks. The app supports estimated arrival times and step-by-step directions on ‌the Apple Watch‌ when using saved destinations like Work or Home. Other destinations require navigation to start on the iPhone, with the directions then picked up by the ‌Apple Watch‌.

Tag: Waze

Top Rated Comments

spinedoc77

41 months ago

Wow! That’s a useful feature! Apple should buy out Waze! What do you guys think?

Apple should have bought out Waze a long time ago, it would have made their maps app actually competitive. Crowd sourcing is incredible and once you use it you can never go back to a non crowd sourced navigation system. Apple looks primitive by comparison.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ericg301

I think Waze has too many niche features to use on my daily commute. I hated getting notifications for stopped cars ahead, or a pothole, or even the police...all just unnecessary.

dude those are literally the things you need for a daily commute. otherwise what's the point?

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

travis64

These notifications are so annoying

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

LOL. "competitive." With a massive base of users, Apple Maps has long been the most used, by far, mapping app on its products, being used many BILLIONS of times each week.

Source? Although I don't doubt that's the case, certainly most consumers just use the preinstalled apps on their devices. But Waze still has a huge following and you can bet a lot of iOS users also use Waze as the crowd sourcing is just incredibly useful. You don't think Apple considers Waze a competitor to their Maps? It would be foolish to think that they don't consider them competition.

Personally I would never consider going back to a navigation app that didn't have crowd sourcing, it would just be going backwards too much.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

mtneer

They should integrate with train schedules and provide guidance around red lights at railroad crossings too. I hate to be stuck behind a 2 mile long freight train trundling along at 15mph.

gaximus

You can turn all those notifications off, except for the rerouting sound. Which is so annoying, I use routing For everything even when I’m going to work, I like to see my ETA, and know about faster routes. But it’s so annoying when it pauses my music every time I make a turn that it’s not expecting.

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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