krankyd wrote: * Traffic is detected automatically using the GPS points sent from the client.

Is there any difference in the detection based on routing being enabled or not?

To me, I break it down like this:

Light Traffic = Traffic dropping below Speed Limit / Free flowing, light tapping of the brakes.
Moderate Traffic = Cars starting to bunch up / Frequent use of the brakes.
Heavy Traffic = Traffic Crawling / Lots of use of the brakes.
Bumper-to-Bumper Traffic = Traffic that comes to a complete stop / Stop and Go traffic.

Oh I agree, I am also awaiting "Krankyd's" wiki. Under Ideal conditions though, the above is what I'd like to see. Then again, I have been pushing for a way to have speed limits put into the segment details for a while now.

It seems as though this thread has gone off at a tangent and no-one has answered my original question. My thoughts are that the words 'light traffic' are not really appropriate when reporting congestion, because 'light traffic' in my vocabulary means a road is free-flowing, no congestion at all. When Waze reports 'light traffic' it means a road is starting to get congested, as Elgirts describes. That is not what 'light traffic' means in English, it is heavy traffic or slight congestion. That's what I'm getting at here. So my question is not about speed limits, how congestion is detected, and so on, it is merely, "Are we using the right words when Waze reports light/moderate/heavy traffic, it should say 'slight/moderate/heavy congestion."

No-one? Must be just me then I still say it's bad English though.

Hi guys,
Here is some information about the way traffic detection works:
* Traffic is detected automatically using the GPS points sent from the client.
* The more unique users we have on a jam the better the chance we'll detect it correctly.
* We try to detect cases where a user has just stopped and not really in a jam based on some algorithms. The problem in these cases is where the GPS 'jumps' (because of an inaccurate GPS chip in the phone). In small segments, the jump might be big enough (in percentile) to make waze think that you are moving, thus creating traffic jams. We're working on new ways to address this behavior.
* When a user manually reports a jam, we will take that into consideration (depends on his points levle) and a jam is more likely to be detected.

we've also noticed your idea about a "pause" button and we're looking into that.

we'll check it with our language specialists.

Looks like we may get some sort of speed limit function *soon*

Hopefully Krankyd will shed some light on this in his upcoming wiki article on traffic.

But note that waze doesn't know what the speed limit is (currently). So traffic detection is not a good indicator of congestion. It just indicates that the speed is slower that the average by some amount. And I presume that the different levels are just an generalization of how much slower it is.