Traffic Events FAQs

1. Which events get push notifications?
In order to get a push notification, an event must:
- Be a real, accurately and appropriately named event with road closures.
- Have a significant traffic impact and the guidelines for whether to send a push or not can vary by road types affected and frequency by which they reoccur. I.e.: If events cover roads with large volumes we're more likely to send a push; for weekly recurring events around stadiums for example we may only send a push for the first event.
- For countries with lower density of Traffic Events in general, we may also send a push for a smaller scale event.
- Construction events will only get notifications if it is a bridge or highway construction (ie: highly impactful), or a partner/community member requests it

2. How do we decide who gets a push notification?
We only send notifications to Wazers who have driven through the affected roads several times in the months prior to the event start date.

Troubleshooting: If you encounter a case where you expect to get a notification and do not, please submit client logs and send us the name and date of the event and the username for the user that was affected so that we can look into it. Timing is critical. This data is only saved in Waze’s backend for a short period of time, so the sooner we know about it, the higher chance we can debug it before the data expires.

3. Why can’t the English event name have special characters?
The reason no special characters are permitted in the English name is because the event url is taken from the english name, and we can't have special characters in the URL. The push notification language is taken from the user's device language, so in most countries, the majority of users will receive the push notification with special characters in their local language.

4. My event doesn’t have an English name! What do I do?
If your event does not have an official English name, you have a few options, listed below in order of preference:
A. Translate the name as best as you can so that it still makes sense to local users (enough that they know what the event is).
B. Make the English event name generic to the event type (instead of “Flying Pig Marathon”, just call it “Marathon”), and leave the complete name of the event in the local language field.
C. Use the local language event name in Latin characters, removing all special characters from it.

5. Why are smaller events added as Traffic Events if they are not “major”?
- Having closures associated to events is helpful for us internally because of all of the metadata we can get around it + the ability to send a push if we decide to
- We are not going to stop adding closures to events just because the events are not "big enough", but there should be a product solution to make this less painful for our editors. Product is aware, but it is prioritized against other needs at Waze, and given the current global situation, with public gathering being less common, we do not expect to see many big changes in the coming months.
- We're asking Product to separate out construction events from waze.com/events. We'd also like there to be more options for deciding which event types you're seeing in the editor itself, but please be patient with us, as these changes will take time.

6. What happened to all of the promised Event features?
All of these features are competing for the same resources as other features at Waze. As mentioned in the question above, given the current global situation, with public gathering being less common, we do not expect to see many big changes in the coming months.

7. How do I report an Event issue?
Please email the issue to waze-closures@google.com. Please include the following:
- The date that you encountered the issue
- The username of whoever encountered it
- Name and date of the event that was affected
- What the issue was in as much detail as possible
- Steps to reproduce (if possible)
- If the issue was in the Waze app, please submit client logs as well

As mentioned above, Waze does not keep this data forever. The faster you report an issue, the more likely our developers will have enough time to look into it before the data disappears.

8. How do I see all known Event issues?
For any bugs, please submit in the WME beta bugs forum or to CenterCode. If you have any feature requests for event issues, please submit them to the WME suggestion box.