Google’s Waze has been watching the “Minority Report” and wants to stop future crimes! Or, at least, it wants to try and help prevent accidents by warning users when they’re entering a dangerous area with a history of accidents.
The navigation app has launched a new beta program, reports Geektime, that will use its community-driven traffic incident information to find roads where many accidents occur, and warn drivers before they get on them.
For drivers, that looks like a red road on their in-app map to let them know specifically where the danger lies. In addition, a pop-up will be shown that alerts the driver that they are getting onto a section of road where accidents happen frequently.
Read: The First Quarter Of 2022 Was The Deadliest In 20 Years On America’s Roads
The idea is that the warnings will help drivers be more alert in areas where there is a “history of crashes.” In an effort not to bombard users with warnings, or distract them and increase the likelihood of a crash, drivers will be served just one warning when they are entering a dangerous area instead of one for every accident-prone road they drive onto.
Waze writes in a pop-up that it uses “reports from drivers and your route” to generate the warnings. With that information, the app may choose not to give you a warning on roads you travel frequently, under the assumption that you don’t really need to be alerted to danger if you know the area well. Users can also opt to simply turn the warnings off altogether, if they prefer never to get them.
This is the first new feature rolled out by Waze since it was subsumed into the group that also runs Google Maps earlier this month, reports The Verge. That will allow the teams to benefit from increased technical collaborations.
Although just a beta feature for now, the function may soon become available to the wider public. It may prove to be particularly useful in the U.S., whose road safety lags behind other nations’ and has seen increasing fatalities in recent years.
