Help speed emergency response! This feature can help save lives.
Can we add a vehicle type, to be used in turn restrictions and segment restrictions, of Emergency Vehicle? Or Authorized Vehicle? Or both?
It is common to find connectors or entire roads that should be routable for police, fire, ambulance, and the like, when they are responding to an emergency (or to set up a speed trap roll eyes). They are not permitted for other uses. Currently, there is some confusion over how to map them, if at all. Ideally, we could just have another restriction type for emergency vehicles, much like HOV-2 and HOV-3 restrictions.
Future app versions would support the feature, also similarly to HOV, where a vehicle or trip could have the vehicle type set to emergency vehicle and route over these segments.
Waze can then provide the benefits of its awesome routing power to help speed emergency response.
A related restriction is authorized vehicle. While this is more situational (a vehicle authorized for one place may not be authorized for another), it does parallel emergency vehicle segment restrictions, and would be up to the user to decide if it makes sense.
Waze’s main strength is to detect congestion or other traffic delays and to route drivers around them.
Emergency vehicles are not impacted in the same way by congestion (by virtue of the lights and sirens). I don’t know why emergency agencies would use Waze.
That’s not really correct. I’ve driven ambulances. Emergency vehicles are still affected by the traffic around them. Also, drivers are not always familiar with the area they are in, and not all agencies/providers install driver-usable GPS units.
So, emergency vehicle drivers still can make use of some form of GPS to help them find a place if they don’t know where it is or how to get there, and Waze in particular may be able to route them around bad traffic that, while it might move out of their way, is still far slower than clear roads or even roads with reasonable traffic.
(When you have a highway that is bumper to bumper, there’s just not that much room for cars to try to get out of the way. In EVOC/CEVO, we learn to avoid driving on shoulders if we can. It isn’t safe - or fast - because they are often not constructed/maintained like drivable roadways, and because it is common for drivers to unexpectedly pull out in front of you onto the shoulder.)
They do not. I’ve been a Police Officer for the past 8 years and while I am all for helping emergency responders get their hands on as many tools as possible to potentially help them, Waze unfortunately would not be one of them. Allow me to explain: Where I work, our 911 center had a private company map every road in our county for our CAD (Computer-aided dispatch) System where they essentially guaranteed accuracy of their map, unfortunately Waze in a lot of areas is still rather inaccurate. I’d hate to see someone be routed to the wrong address when someones life is on the line. Additionally, most emergency responders know which roads get congested during what times.
MOGODLEW, I understand your position, but I’ve been involved with vollies, and trust me, many of them have NOTHING. And if they ever get a Mutual Aid call, or have a new driver in a big, sparse area, well, I’m not going to say people have died waiting, but you can read your small town paper.
BTW, the PSAP typically has fantastic info, because they’re usually consolidated across a wider area and/or run by a higher level of government. They get funded and get modern tech, including good CAD.
Its when they pass the call to the vollie operator that you sometimes get in trouble. The operators know this,and will often try to give enough info to make it easier to make the scene, giving address, cross streets, and sometimes even best major intersection to route through.
Then again, there are PSAPs that are still running on index cards.