Waze

In and around the Dallas area, we find using the Waze app on our smartphones to be extremely helpful. Even though we usually know how to get where we're going (at least generally), Waze is crowd-sourced, so there is information provided through many other drivers as well, and in the DFW area, there are many users, so the information is up to date.

On Thursday afternoon, we got away from the house a little later than planned, and so got into traffic on I-35E heading north with other rush hour drivers. We could see from the Waze display that traffic was very heavy and reported to be at a standstill ahead of us. In "real time", Waze told us that there was a major accident ahead of us, and instructed us to get off at the next exit.

Unlike interstates in many other places, much of the time, interstates in Texas have "frontage roads" that run right alongside the interstate. There are frequently businesses along the frontage roads, and most of the time the frontage road has stop lights at major intersections. But... along the stretch of I-35E that we take from the house to the campground, the frontage road has only one place where there is a stop light in about 8 miles of distance. With the construction on the roadways, the locations of exits and entrances between the freeway and frontage road frequently move, or at some hours of the day or night are closed, so having information that is updated by other users is very useful.

In the past, when there is heavy traffic, Waze will sometimes direct us to stay on the frontage road for much of the distance, sometimes going onto the freeway and right back off again if the frontage road is also backed up. It almost always recommends getting on the freeway at the one place where there is a stop light.

It turned out that on Thursday afternoon, the major accident was just beyond where that stoplight is on the frontage road, so Waze told us to get off and directed us through the stop light. We had to wait for 3 cycles of the light, but we could see that the traffic on the interstate remained pretty much stopped. When we got through the light, we continued on the frontage road and could see that the accident had all but one lane blocked - and they weren't really allowing a "lane" of traffic through, it required a kind of S-curve through the emergency and damaged vehicles to get through. We bypassed it on the frontage road and got back on right past the accident, avoiding a very long delay.

We would not use Waze's directions when we're driving the bus (at least not the ones that recommend getting on/off the frontage road - we have used it to take recommendations for a different freeway in Fort Worth when we came up from Whitney), but it is very helpful in knowing about problems that are reported by other drivers way before the traffic reporting on the Garmin is aware.