Waze Updates to Help You Easily Avoid Road Closures

Waze is one of our favorite turn-by-turn navigation apps thanks to its ridiculously long list of useful features. Today, it adds the ability to report road closures so you can warn others about inactive roads and avoid them yourself.

Waze explains how this feature came about and why it's important:

During Hurricane Sandy, Waze was contacted by FEMA and the White House to tap the community of drivers in New York help each other find open gas stations. The community responded and worked together, illustrating once again the power of the crowd. While Hurricane Sandy was one of many events this year that drastically changed the roadways for local drivers, extreme weather conditions affect roads everywhere, everyday. Events like major accidents, oil spills, floods, and construction zones can impose road changes and force major highways to close for several hours. Until now, there's been no solution that can keep up with the temporary and often unpredictable nature of these events.

You can't close a road just by submitting an alert, however. Waze weighs your influence level based on your history of good information so no one can report bad data and instantly change the map for everyone?it has to be a group effort. Additionally, if a road opens back up and a Waze user happens to drive through it, the system will clear the road block because someone made it past. This update brings Waze to version 3.6 and should be rolling its way into the iTunes App Store and Google Play right now.

Waze for iOS and Android (Free)

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/SUQd9dWewQ0/waze-updates-to-help-you-easily-avoid-road-closures

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