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What is Waze?
Waze is a navigation app that uses crowd-sourced data and your phone’s GPS to deliver turn-by-turn directions and accurate ETAs. Drivers report incidents like crashes, road work, speed traps, and closures. Waze combines those reports with live speed data to pick the quickest route and adjust it on the fly.
Because Waze reacts to current road conditions, it’s popular with commuters and delivery drivers who need to avoid congestion. The app also supports voice guidance, preferred routes, and planned drives so you can check traffic before you leave.
How Waze works
Waze runs in the background while you drive and continuously updates your route. When other users flag a slowdown or hazard, you’ll see it on the map along with suggested detours. You can also contribute reports with a few taps, which helps the community keep the map fresh and useful.
The app shows recent drives in your history so you can review where you went and how long it took. However, Waze focuses on navigation, not data entry, so the interface keeps things simple and light to minimize distraction while driving.
Can you use Waze for mileage tracking?
Waze is not a dedicated mileage tracker. While you can view recent trips in the app, it doesn’t categorize drives as business or personal, and it isn’t designed to produce formal, audit-ready mileage logs by itself. If you need detailed records for taxes or reimbursements, you’ll want a tool built specifically for mileage logging and reporting.
FAQ
Waze relies on its large user community to submit live reports of traffic conditions, hazards, and police activity. These crowd-sourced updates are combined with anonymous speed and location data from active users to calculate optimal routes and estimated arrival times.
While Waze isn’t built for formal mileage logs, it does store your recent trip history showing start/end points and distances. You can manually reference or export this history for general mileage reference, but it doesn’t categorize trips as business or personal.
Waze is available as a free app on iOS and Android devices. It can also run in a browser via Waze’s Live Map for planning routes on desktop.
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