Hi
They’ve been in beta for a while now, but I saw that waze has started rolling it out in WME https://www.waze.com/discuss/t/green-light-traffic-lights-have-landed-in-wme-production-all-environments/398557
Is this something we’re going to start adding to the Swedish map? I saw the feature is there, but yeah, it’s above my level / maybe not active yet.
Thanks for bringing that up, I’ve only just thought about doing it… 
It’s active in WME, probably for L4+. If I’ve understood correctly, it isn’t active in the app for us yet.
It seems like it’s going to be used in standard turn instructions in the app. (Turn right at the traffic lights). Should it affect how we enter instructions from signs?
Yes, it says in the article that level 4 is default
Exactly, for one thing you can get instructions “at the traffic lights,” and they also show up on the map, of course; they should even be able to affect the routing
It should be active for beta in ROW, at least from what I can see
Hi everyone!
Until we have made a decision on if, when, and how we will introduce this in Sweden, the level is now set to 5 and may only be used for evaluation, not for general implementation!
We are currently a bit skeptical about the added value—a huge amount of extra data has to be added to the map, for what purpose? Is it really that difficult for us today to know when it’s time to turn? How many people even have voice instructions turned on in their daily lives?
We can bring this up at the meeting in Stockholm in a week or so.
Yeah, and since when do you have, like, trouble seeing traffic lights 
they show up in the app like ph s
I’ve been driving around Europe quite a bit this week, and since it’s mapped in quite a few countries and I have the feature as a beta tester, I’ve noticed that—and since the feature is already known, I can share this here as well: just as an observation.
Overall, it works well and is sometimes relatively useful; for example, in villages with few or the only traffic light in sight, it’s at its most useful.
Sometimes, though not too often, it becomes a bit less helpful. Say there are several traffic lights close together and I need to go straight through the first one and then left at the second; the TTS says “turn left at the traffic light.” It would have been better not to get a notification about it (the traffic light) at all, or to have some logic for that.
Having them on the map can be handy every now and then; I wanted to turn left to get into a gas station but there was a lot of traffic, but then I saw on the map that the next intersection had signals and there was a short detour. I don’t feel it clutters too much; there’s a cap logic that seems to work well in cities. It’s the TTS instruction that can be a bit less helpful then.
Mobil magazine had a short piece the other day about traffic lights now being available in Waze. Just as a heads-up that there might be requests/questions from the public.
Ah, I see, it hasn’t been released in the client in Sweden yet though, but I saw they started the rollout in prod in Germany, among others, yesterday.
Here is the link to Mobil: Waze börjar visa trafikljus i kartan
M3 has also written about it: Waze börjar nu visa trafiksignaler på kartan - M3
It’s working for me in the app in the places where we’ve tested adding traffic lights. I have the regular app and not the Beta.
But then the question is whether we should have it in Sweden. It’s going to be a massive job to add. Plus, it becomes even more tied to a node. I already notice today that things are missed when someone redesigns an intersection or a roundabout. Many people miss that the old intersection had, for example, lane guidance and road signs.
That’s weird, you shouldn’t have that in the prod app 
I’ll check with staff, sometimes they roll things out a bit weirdly, it’s happened that for example AM was included early.
Yeah, it really is a question of whether it’s worth it, as we’ve discussed, it’s not like there’s exactly a shortage of other things to do on the Swedish map…
I also think it’s a bit of a shame Waze is prioritizing this when the school zones are still far from working as well as they should; personally, I think those provide much more value in comparison.
@pnylin you see it because you are a Beta-Editor, apparently rolled out to those with that role
Agreed.
I added a lot of school zones in southern Sweden, but after several reports of incorrect speeds (I’ve changed it to the regular speed and added the lower speed in the school zone), I chose to give up for now and wait until this is fully functional.
Traffic lights are live in Sweden; they are visible in the regular app. However, we temporarily chose to halt the implementation, as @pnylin mentioned.
Someone did manage to add a bunch in Lund, but otherwise, there should only be a few individual test areas.
I would like to get more feedback from the community here on how we should proceed!? Why we should implement this or why not.
I personally agree with @pnylin’s line of reasoning; there is already a lot of information linked to a node today, making it easy for things to get lost during changes. Furthermore, I see very little value, if any at all, in this information contributing to navigation.
Yes, it’s live in WME but not in the prod Waze app for prod users; it’s starting to roll out there now in some countries, and not fully but “Limited”. However, it should be active for all beta and wme-beta, i.e., the app.
I agree with what I think I managed to get across there; it’s certainly nice in some situations, but it doesn’t feel worth it, just like you and pnylin are suggesting.
Based on the feedback I received on my feedback above that I left in beta, it also doesn’t seem like it will be expanded in the near future.
Personally, I find it difficult to see the benefit of showing traffic lights on the map. The only thing they contribute, at least currently, is instructing the user to turn at a traffic light instead of at a specific street name. If you aren’t familiar with the road number/name beforehand or can’t see it on the map, the traffic light information can admittedly be of some use.
Should we nevertheless end up deciding that we want to introduce traffic lights on the map, we can import them from Google, with the quality shortcomings that entails.
/Ulle
Hi
I’m siding with the skeptics. If we start adding them, it will never be 100% correct. Better to focus our efforts on, for example, lane-assist
Dan (4)
You’re probably right, Waze has tricked me. They did introduce a separate icon for the app with a clear beta tag, but it seems to be a bit buggy. v5.20.0.2, which I have now, is a beta and not the public version as I thought.
That beta tag is super tricky, because if it’s an RC, it doesn’t have a beta icon, even though you still have all the beta features; 0.2 is an RC.
Now that the summer road trip is over, I can mention that I’m even more negative towards the feature. Two reasons:
I almost went crazy in Karlsruhe when it said “at the traffic light” for every intersection; it really was “I’m driving with stupid,” but it’s also a problem in other cities. Seeing them on the map can be good sometimes, admittedly, or as mentioned above when it’s a one-off, but yeah, when there are tons of them in a city with tons of traffic lights… it might have been a bug because there’s supposed to be some cap/logic, but yeah, it wasn’t a good experience.
And you can’t turn it off in the voice settings; even with “less talkative” it will keep nagging about “at the traffic light.”
I personally took a road trip to Ålesund in Norway. It’s a fairly small town, so the traffic lights are few and far between. I have the app set to speak only for alerts. So I didn’t get a single audio notification about the traffic lights. I used Waze directly on my phone, and I thought the traffic light icons were very small, so they weren’t very visible either. I haven’t tested it with Android Auto and thus a larger screen yet.
So my conclusion is that they didn’t really serve a direct purpose, but they weren’t a source of irritation either. That can certainly be partly explained by my voice settings in combination with the few traffic lights.