For alternate Waze to drive

After feedback from a Facebook friend, I decided to give the Waze app a try. It's a crowd-sourced navigation tool that allows you to report on hazards, police, enforcement cameras, construction, traffic and accidents as you pass them, so that other Waze users can be aware of what to expect on their journey and make choices accordingly.

As you drive with Waze active, it displays your movement on a self-orienting map (nice) and shows anything you need to know about as a symbol. You can swipe your hand across the front of your phone's camera to activate voice mode for hands-free commands. As you drive, you get traffic reports from across the city for all major issues. You can adjust how far away those reports will come from. You can spot other Waze users on the map (if they allow) and ping them too. You can also fix map inconsistencies, which is a nice touch. Although these days, with the exception of brand new neighbourhoods, there aren't many map errors anymore.

At the moment you can only navigate to and from work and home, but I'm thinking that once this app is out of beta, full navigation might be their goal. If it continues to include crowd-sourced traffic updates and hazards, I'm all for it.