We expect navigation apps to warn us about gridlock, give us the best routes, and tell us how long our drives will be. But Waze is rolling out a new speed-limits feature that, while useful, might come off as a pain at first.
The crowdsourced traffic app now includes limits information for thousands of roads, and it will tell you when you’re breaking the law.
Waze‘s new function isn’t available everywhere yet; it’s currently available in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad, Tobago, and Uruguay, the developer said in a blog post today. But the rest of the world is “coming soon.”
The new notifications appear in the on-screen speedometer. When you exceed the speed limit, a bubble will show up in the corner to remind you of how fast you should be going. And you can even customize it to not appear until you’ve crossed a certain overage like 5, or 10 miles (or kilometers, presumably) per hour. Or if you’re a true speed demon, you can set it to let you know when you’re going 15 percent over. Although at that point, we’re not sure you even care what the speed limit is.
Waze says it has a community of over 360,000 users who have spent the past couple of months logging and submitting speed-limit information. They also contribute by submitting information about police traps, accidents, and other road conditions.
