This FAQ should be read together with the Official FAQ and the Technical FAQ. The glossary explains words and phrases which are often used with special meanings.
What are those dots on some of the roads?
These are roads that have not been confirmed by being driven over since either being imported from another mapping source, or since being created in the map editor. It is more likely that the road layout or junctions are incorrect so treat them with caution. When you drive over such roads your Waze icon changes to a Pacman-type character and "munches the dots". This earns you points and confirms the road as valid. These roads are also known as Pacman-roads.
What is Waze Map Editor?
Waze Map Editor is the official name of the current, primary web-based map editor. It is often abbreviated WME. It is strongly recommended that you use WME for all Waze Map editing vs. the older editor Cartouche. You can access WME:
- http://www.waze.com/editor (USA and Canada users)
- http://world.waze.com/editor (The rest of the World (ROTW) / countries other than the USA and Canada)
What is Cartouche?
Cartouche is the name of the previous map editor. It will be available for use until all required functionality is available in the Waze Map Editor.
What is Papyrus?
Papyrus is the internal code name used for Waze Map Editor (WME) prior to beta release in January 2012. The use of 'Papyrus' is discouraged in favor of Waze Map Editor or WME.
What is Dashboard?
Dashboard is the name of your personal information console. You can find various information about your Waze account here, including most recent driven routes. You can access it through: http://www.waze.com/dashboard (Northern America users) http://world.waze.com/dashboard (International/other users)
What are my Drives?
Drives are journeys that you have driven with the Waze client running. While you drive Waze monitors your journey (recording details like location, time & speed) and transfers this information to the servers. This data is used to validate the existing mapping (roads, turns etc) and to learn average journey times. Other Waze users and Area Managers can also view the anonymous GPS tracks of many users when editing the map in Waze Map Editor. This helps with map accuracy.
When do my Drives show up in the Dashboard?
Updates of the dashboard takes place daily, so you have to wait at least 24-48h before changes show up, and if the servers are bogged down, you may need to wait 3-5 days before you will see your routes. For very long routes, routes may take up to a week to appear.
When do my Drives show up in the Waze Map Editor?
Drives are processed and available for viewing in the Waze Map Editor with an hour of completing the drive. For most drives, you will find them in the editor in under 15 minutes.
What happens when I drive on an unknown (unmapped) road?
If you simply drive on an unknown road, Waze simply records your route information as usual, but will not create them with as new roads in the Editor, Livemap or the app. When viewing a Drive in the Waze Map Editor, you can look for sections of your drive which are colored red. These indicate an area your phone reported you driving which Waze was not able to associate to an existing road. If this road should exist here, you can select the red section of the route and create a new segment from it.
You can help to build the maps by adding unknown roads. Simply switch on road building mode in your Waze client and it will record the route as a series of new road segments adding junctions (also known as nodes) where it detects your turns. When Waze detects that you are back on a known road, road building mode is automatically paused.
Please turn off road building mode when it is not needed as it can lead to duplicate roads being recorded due to the existing maps being slightly inaccurate or due to GPS errors on your client. Remember that the Waze client is dependent on having a good GPS fix for accurate recording. Also the Waze client might falsely record new roads if it hasn't been able to download the map tiles for your location due to poor cellular phone coverage etc.
When recording new roads, wait until the road turns red on your client before turning off road building mode otherwise the final segment is not recorded. This behaviour is useful if you forgot to turn it off earlier and have accidentally started to record a road in error.
Updates of the Cartouche map are made based on your recording, but you have to wait at least 24-48h before changes show up.
I recorded new roads in the client - what now?
Your newly recorded roads will not appear in Livemap until they have been edited in the Waze Map Editor. WME will show unknown roads in red, however Livemap will only show small arrows if you zoom right in to indicate that it knows of an street/road with no name. The Cartouche update will need to be done by either you or the appropriate Area Manager, or another user who has also driven close to this road previously.
Please log into WME and edit the details of the road you recorded. You can set the road category, it's name, city and direction(s). You should also check it's connectivity to other roads to allow Waze to use it correctly for routing. At the very least you should confirm the driving direction and connect the road to another road.
This is an important part of Wazing as it helps our community build the maps for eveyone to use.
It is planned to implement functionality in the Waze servers to countdown from the road creation so that they disappear from WME unless they have been edited (something like 30 days) to prevent roads incorrectly recorded from remaining on the Livemap.
When do my roads show up in the Livemap?
Generation of the Livemap should tale place daily, but the queue of changes is lengthy, so most map edits should appear in the LiveMap after 10-14 days. However, only the closest zoom level is currently updated regularly. Updates to the map on the Waze client app happen at the same time.
From the Waze web application you can look at the Live Map tab and at the lower left of the screen below the map you will see the last update of that map information.
Newly recorded roads will not appear in Livemap until they have been edited in the map editor. This will need to be done by either you or the appropriate Area Manager.
When do my roads show up in the Waze app?
Tiles on the client are cached, and only refreshed when one of the following three conditions is met:
- You are showing a specific location on the map from the address search.
- You are navigating to or through the tile.
- The tile is over one week old.
Note that they always need to be propagated to the Live Map first, before showing on the client application.
From the Waze web application you can look at the Live Map tab and at the lower left of the screen below the map you will see the last update of that map information. You can check for Map tile updating delays at Waze Status.
What web browser do you recommend for editing roads?
Waze recommends using the Google Chrome browser or Google Chrome Frame plugin with Internet Explorer for map editing in Waze Map Editor (WME).
Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) is limited and some editing functions may not work properly. Many users find that using Firefox is fine, and Safari is also generally OK.
The following browsers are acceptable for use with Cartouche:
Why do I get to see traffic reports hundreds of miles away in the client?
The traffic reports on the client show the nearest 20 reports. Sometimes, when there are not many wazers in your area, you'll see traffic reports from a areas that are farther away. Waze only actively shows you the traffic reports within a certain radius of your location (using a pop-up), so if you are not interested in seeing reports from farther away, do not click the traffic report button.
What is a locked road?
The lock feature does the following:
- Locking segments will prevent lower users from changing it only if it is close to their driving area.
If they are area managers at this location, they can still edit the segment.Remark: To be deleted, has been altered by the new editing rights system
The locking function may still perform some of it's legacy functions:
- Disables any automated geometry changes - i.e. GPS tracks will no longer drag the road towards some average of all GPS tracks on a segment. Manual editing is still possible.
- Disables any automated driving direction change - i.e. if you set the road as one way, even if someone drives the opposite way, it will remain one way. (This has some unlocking to it - if a lot of people drive the opposite way, or only the opposite way, eventually it will unlock)
- Sets the routing to 'obey' the connectivity on the segment. That is, if a turn is not allowed in Waze Map Editor, usually the routing algorithm will give such a turn a penalty of x points and will try to avoid it, as much as possible. If the segment is locked, the penalty to make a turn against what is defined in WME grows a lot, and the chances of getting a turn instruction that is against what has been defined is almost non existent.
Why are aerials not available or are low resolution?
Due to Waze's business model (which keeps the product free to us users) they are limited in what sources they can use for aerial maps. Normally this means using free sources which will of course be of lower resolution or availability then aerials available from commercial sources. If you know of a source that the licensing appears to be free for commercial use and in particular has no strings on derivative use, then send that source to Waze using the Quick Help support form found at Waze Support and they will look into it, and see if it will work.
On My Dashboard all my points have gone, and the date of last update is very old. What's wrong?
You are probably logged in to the wrong server
USA/Canada users:
Israeli-an users:
All other 'international' users:
How are points calculated?
From the blog post [1]
| USA | points | unit |
|---|---|---|
| Normal driving | 5 | per mile |
| Road reporting¹ | 6 | per report |
| Report comments | 3 | per comment |
| Road munching | 16 | per mile |
| New road recording | 64 | per mile |
| Editing the map² | 1.5 | per edit |
| Solving map update requests | 3 | per request solved |
| Adding street names | 3 | per name |
| Adding house numbers | 3 | per house number |
| Forum posts | 2 | per 3 forum posts |
| World | points | unit |
|---|---|---|
| Normal driving | 3.2 | per km |
| Road reporting¹ | 6 | per report |
| Report comments | 3 | per comment |
| Road munching | 10 | per km |
| New road recording | 40 | per km |
| Editing the map² | 1.5 | per edit |
| Solving map update requests | 3 | per request solved |
| Adding street names | 3 | per name |
| Adding house numbers | 3 | per house number |
| Forum posts | 2 | per 3 forum posts |
¹ Pings, chit-chats and their comments do not accumulate points.
² Mass-editing (selecting multiple roads and update them) in Cartouche counts for 1.5 point per road segment you edit, independent of how many fields/attributes are updated. (From the Waze Forum [2] )
How do I change my home state or country?
The scoreboard allows you to compete for points against other wazers in your state or country. Waze automatically matches you to the state or country based on where you have earned the most points in the last week. If you travel several states a lot, send in a support ticket via the Quick Help form at Waze Support to have them lock your home state.
How can I remove or delete a group that I've created in Waze?
Send in a support ticket via the Quick Help at Waze Support.
How can I delete my account and all info from waze?
Send in a support ticket via the Quick Help form at Waze Support with your Waze username and registered email address.
When are weekly points calculated?
Points are added up from Monday through Sunday. Alerts usually appear on your client on Monday morning.
Why isn't the location of other Wazers in the app accurate?
Other Wazers shown on the map in the app are delayed by between 2-5 minutes. This is both for security concerns, server capacity, and network data capacity. It would be a huge amount of data required to update every Wazer's location every 2 seconds.