Intersection

User-powered traffic app Waze has been giving thought to Vegas’ roads. But is it confused?

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There’s no getting around LA without Waze. The Google-owned GPS traffic app—available for iOS, Android, Windows and even Blackberry—draws on a variety of resources to provide up-to-the-second traffic alerts, from local transportation agencies to reports from users themselves. (Pressing a button or two does this; distraction time is minimal.) Two years ago, an LA friend suggested it for a drive from Beverly Hills to Burbank; it drew out a route that took me onto side streets, through alleys and, I think, through a driveway or two. But damn if it didn’t save me half an hour.

At first, I didn’t use Waze to get around Vegas, because user reporting here wasn’t consistent enough to make it work well. But now, it is—and I’ve been using Waze for my daily Downtown-to-Henderson commute for the past month. The results, so far, have been mixed.

On one hand, Waze knows rush hour. I have two choices to get home from work—the 215 to the 15, or the 215 to the 95—and Waze can tell me in a second which to choose, based on information more accurate than what’s accessible to Google Maps. It’s kinda creepy, actually: Waze tells me where police are stationed, where there’s debris on the roadway, where stalled vehicles might cause a backup—and it gets to within a few feet of the actual obstructions. I’ve even reported a few things, and it made me feel useful.

But Waze makes head-scratching decisions, too. I turned off the “reduce difficult intersections” feature because I was tired of all the right-left-right-lefts I was asked to make to avoid one traffic light. (It did teach me some good tricks, though. I’ll never wait to make a turn from southbound Las Vegas Boulevard to westbound Sahara Avenue again.) And it occasionally suggests routes that make no sense at all, like when it took me off a traffic-free, Henderson-bound 95 and put me on a surface-street route that crossed the 95 not once, but twice. If there were a “seriously?!” button on the app, I would have pressed it and held it down.

But this is trivial stuff. Waze is still learning about Vegas, and it will improve. It had better. It’s getting to be a lot like LA around here.

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