Key Takeaways
- Google Maps now displays incident reports from the Waze community, showing alerts like “Police reported ahead.”
- The bottom sheet with the report disappears after a while or can be manually closed, ensuring minimal distraction for drivers.
- The feature may not be widely available yet, with only a few users reporting its visibility.
In late July, Google said it would bring a bunch of changes to the Maps app, including improved incident reporting. Google also said it would make it easier to log incident reports with assistance “from the Maps and Waze communities.” At the same time, Waze said that users would soon see reports from its users directly in the Google Maps app. A few months after the announcement, Google Maps is now beginning to display incident reports from the Waze community.
As spotted by Reddit user Truckin_18, a bottom sheet appears during navigation with the alert/report, which in this case is “Police reported ahead.” Right below it, we see the attribution to Waze (“from Waze drivers“), followed by “Are they still there?” with large Yes and No buttons below (via 9to5Google). To ensure you’re not too distracted while driving, this bottom sheet disappears after a while, though you can choose to close it immediately by tapping the X icon on the top right of the sheet.
It’s not widely available just yet
It doesn’t appear to be rolling out widely, however, with only the aforementioned Redditor and another user in the comments section reporting the feature’s visibility. It could also be limited to some regions, at least for the time being, though we are unable to confirm that.
As 9to5 points out, any cooperation between the two Google-run navigation apps makes a great deal of sense. While there may be times when you find inaccurate incident reports while driving, the large Yes and No buttons ensure fellow motorists get the correct info in real-time.
This comes after Google Maps replaced speed traps with a Police option in the incident reporting menu last week. This feature was also first announced by Google in late July, along with a handful of other upgrades to both Maps and Waze, some of which we touched on above.
Are you seeing incident reports from Waze in the Google Maps app?