Waze has started a limited test of traffic light icons that show up on the navigation map, fulfilling what’s been one of its users’ biggest requests: to help them better understand where they need to stop at intersections. The test is apparently live in Israel with restricted display limits that seek to minimize on-screen clutter.
What Waze Is Testing with Traffic Light Icons Now
Waze is testing the feature in its home country of Israel, Geektime reports. While driving, the app brings up no more than three nearby traffic lights at a time. That cap seems deliberate: Waze wants drivers to concentrate on turns and hazards, not searching through a sea of icons.
If you open the app when you don’t have an active route, it’s a different story. Waze will display all the traffic lights around your current location to give you a wider view of the intersection landscape. This is an initial build, and there’s no indication of when or if the feature will be added to a broader release.
Waze confirmed earlier this year that traffic light support was on its roadmap. Since Waze and Google Maps both sit within Alphabet, the company could pull from the vast signal library from Google, instead of having to recreate that entire resource through community edits — though use of its map has long relied on its own editor community and data pipelines.
The Significance of Traffic Lights to Navigation
It’s not just for sightseeing where signals sit along a route. It can enhance safety cues, refine ETAs, and minimize last-second lane changes. Intersections are one of the most dangerous components of a road system, with NHTSA studies attributing about 40 percent of crashes to intersection-related factors, while federal roadway safety programs continuously direct resources at signalized intersections for upgrades.
On a pragmatic level, signal density molds how drivers pace their acceleration, select lanes, and anticipate turns. Visual cues also help with the ability to differentiate between a controlled versus uncontrolled intersection — particularly in dense grids or unfamiliar suburbs where many junctions can be seen in close proximity.
For routing engines, signal location information can reduce the cost of a path. In the case where two routes are about equal distance apart, we may take fewer traffic lights on one route to make it faster during off-peak hours. Waze already leverages real-time reports to guess at delays; layering on signal awareness gives it another signpost around which it can build a more precise forecast.
How It Compares With Google Maps and Other Apps
Google Maps began featuring traffic lights just a few years ago, initially in some cities before a broader rollout. Apple Maps has visual indicators for signals and voice prompts that mention lights or stop signs, while other guidance services, like TomTom, have also focused on signalized intersections in some parts of the country.
Waze’s test is more modest, but also quite straightforward: instead of showing a dizzying number of signals during turn-by-turn instruction, there will be fewer. It’s consistent with the app’s always-rather-spartan-in-design approach: you want a clean dashboard, you need to focus on important alerts like hazards and speed cameras, and you need only enough detail to make confident decisions at road speed.
The question is whether Waze’s pilots are more than just symbols. What does it mean for a tech company to be diversified beyond the app? For instance, the company could use this data to get better at phrasing in voice warnings — “turn right at the traffic light” — or to subtly ding red-light-prone corridors during certain dayparts. Without such measures, simply offering a clear, consistent representation of signaling would make Waze feature-competitive in an ability many users have come to expect as table stakes.
What Comes Next for Waze’s Traffic Light Testing
There’s no announced timeline for a broader rollout, and map completeness, level of editor coverage, and back-end processing inventories could determine where the feature lands next. Israel is a great test ground — Waze was originally based there, and Israel’s driving environment provides a good distribution from urban to suburban behavior for validating the UI edge cases.
It will probably be a successful icon if it feels less novel and does not get in the way of usefulness: do drivers really appreciate it, and does the arrival time improve at all? If the early feedback is good, you might expect Waze to then roll out country by country, which theoretically could leverage Google’s existing data sets to help scale.
As of now, the test represents a significant pivot. Responding to years of community demand, Waze is now closing a small but visible hole with competitors — and it’s doing so using an approach that has always been consistent with its less-is-more ethos from behind the wheel.
