We’ve all sat in traffic between here and the greater Las Vegas area that isn’t moving due to construction or an accident. So we’ve been looking for a solution that was better than just giving a general shout to Social Media asking, “Hey? How’s the traffic into Henderson?”
While there are lots of different traffic Apps out there, we’ve found that Waze is turning into the one we like the best – so we figured you’d like to know this too!
Go to the App store on your smart phone and you can download the FREE Waze App there.
Once installed, it’s pretty easy to use (see the screen shot from our phone and the map, above):
1. Open the App.
2. In the ‘Where To?’ box, enter your destination. Enter by street address or what it is, ie: Green Valley Ranch.
3. Waze tells you current estimated time, and any issues or slow downs you might see.
But here’s the best part – once you start your journey, it follows not just your progress, but every other Waze user who has the App open and tracking during your journey. So you see live in real time the speeds of others on the road along your route. (Those little gold dots on the map above are other Waze travelers, live, in real time.)
It also alerts you to construction activity, accidents and police patrol activity.
The more people who use the Waze App, the better it is. So the bottom line is, the more people we have locally who use it, the more useful it becomes!
Example: last Sunday afternoon we were crawling along in traffic on our way back from Henderson, (because in our family, sometimes you HAVE to go to R.E.I…). We’re trolling along at 15 mph., but we can see from the other Waze user in front of us, that it looks like we could save time by turning off the Highway onto Veteran’s Memorial Drive, so we did. We could clearly see from the App that speeds weren’t improving as we got closer to town. Mind you…driving comes first so be sure you’re hands free or your passenger is the one looking…don’t be a distracted driver.
They also have a Carpool option, but we haven’t looked at that feature yet. Hope this is useful to folks and we’ll be seeing you on Waze soon!
