Good morning and great question.

At this time there is really only two main ways to add lane closure information: with an in app hazard report or by one of Connected Citizen Program members (CCP more info here www.waze.com/ccp)

It is a great way for construction companies to give alerts to motorists of hazards up ahead.

If you know of full road closures let us know in that circumstances we can enter Real Time Closures (RTC) so you won't be routed on that road.

@IGadget-, We do incorporate this information directly into Discord where several other volunteer editors monitor and add/remove these closures. As PesachZ replied previously, we do not add partial lane closures as long as traffic can still route both directions, this includes eastbound being close but routing east bound through the westbound lane either by alternating traffic or taking over one of the lanes completely. If a road is completely blocked in one direction (Traffic cannot go that direction at all) or both directions these closures will be added to the best of our ability.


It's good to remember we are all volunteers and try our best to get these added/removed in a timely manor but do at times become busy and miss some.

At least in NY, if you sign up for NY-Alert, you get an email or text any time they close a road or restrict lanes for more than an hour in whatever areas you define. Once the police or a highway department close a lane officially, then that gets pushed to the DOT with the location and reason and it is sent out. When it is reopened, then that information is also put out. I'm surprised Waze doesn't incorporate that feed.

Hey spvfd47 thanks for your interest, and willingness toshare your knowledge and help the rest of the Wazing community. As was mentioned above already, there are two distinct closure scenarios handled differently by Waze and the community. The terminology may be confusing to someone not familiar with our vernacular.

1 lane closures as used in the Waze community refers to partial road closures. Specifically roads which are still drivable (in both directions on a 2 way Rd) in at least one lane/shoulder. Even though the through speed is significantly affected by such lane closures, routing through that Rd is still possible. We do not make any changes to these to prevent the Waze routing engine from using them. Rather we rely on the internal Waze algorithms which are always working to choose the fastest route based on historical and real time traffic data. These algorithms will detect the shower through speeds and use a detour if, and only if it proves to be faster overall.
We can however mark these on the app screen with construction hazard alerts to warn drivers of the changed traffic pattern and potential show down. This can be done by anyone driving past, or by official Waze CCP partners through a feed/tool to Waze.
2 full closures as the name indicates we use this term to refer to roads which are completely non drivable in at least one direction which is usually open to traffic. We can tell the routing engine to ignore these roads in one or both directions for a set amount of time, or on a set schedule. These are what we refer to as RTC - Real Time Closures. They can be entered in the app by reporting a road closure, by any wazer driving past. However app reported closures are less reliable and will not likely affect the routing engine as well as RTC entered online by the community. We in the community actively try to monitor and place these closures when we know about them. If you have information about full road closures I encourage you join us in our live chat where you can let us know about these and we can put them on the map.

We have an active community of editors here in New York and use the live chat platform Discord to collaborate together. I encourage you to join us there. https://discord.gg/pQMXYAc

So just to clarify on what John meant by adding lane closure information. It has no bearing on the map at all. Putting a hazard report so that the client can see there's a hazard up ahead does not affect routing.

In terms of routing, when Wazers travel through spots with their app open, data is gathered passively. From there, waze determines all on its own based on algorithms that a certain path is slower than others, and that could be due to many reasons: rubbernecking, rush hour traffic build up, a lane closure, but it doesn't really matter to the algorithm what's the cause, it just does it's own thing and calculates travel time from there.

That's what I'm trying to do. Thru my job I get updates of road and lanes closures. I'd like to add them the maps to help with real time routing.