This week my area experienced annual flooding and road closures.
How well did Waze work? Waze routed me on flooded roads!

How important is this? Very. I wasted several hours getting routed to a flooded road with a horrendous congested detour. I'm still pretty disgruntled over it. Technology such as Waze should have solved this.

Did Waze warn me? Nope. Should have.

Did Waze know about the road closure do to flooding? Nope, but should have.

Here are some problems with the normal road closure:
There's a lot of steps to complete to submit for a flooded road. Not something I liked doing when driving, but I wanted others to benefit.
You have to be near the closed road to submit a closure.
The road closure appears to be one way.
The road closure duration is flawed. When there's a flood, we don't know when the road is going to reopen. Could be hours, could be days, could be a week.

So here are some ideas...

Reporting:

There is an official government website posting road closures. Either Waze can automatically intake the closures, or allow a Waze user to submit closures through the website (and other methods).

The road should remain closed until: A) The government website reopens the road; B) A Wazer drives on the road (since we have no idea when the road will reopen). Really no need to report the road as open when you have drivers on it!

Advanced:

Waze could make some assumptions that when a road is expected to have traffic (historical data), but doesn't have any travelers, there's a problem, and there could be an alert. This could signal a road closure from a flood, down tree, blocked road, some anomaly, etc. For advanced users, you could send them a report so they can investigate and report their findings.

Thanks,
Jake