02 In detail
Waze and Blue Light Maps do different jobs
Most comparisons are about choosing one product over another. This one is mostly about using each for what it’s good at.
Waze knows what’s happening on the road right now better than almost anything else, because the drivers sitting in it are reporting it. It also reaches those drivers. That’s why we use it. When a crew drives to a call in emergency mode, Blue Light Alert sends an approaching emergency vehicle alert into Waze along their route, so drivers ahead hear about them before they can see or hear the blue lights.
What Waze isn’t built for is routing the emergency vehicle itself.
What Waze does well
Live reports. Crashes, hazards, closures and stationary traffic, reported as they happen. For a routine journey, that’s hard to beat.
Reach. A warning in Waze lands on the screens of drivers who are already on the road and already looking at their navigation. Waze also runs Waze for Cities, a free programme that lets public agencies, including emergency services, publish closures and incidents. Those updates also appear in Google Maps.
It’s free, and familiar. Plenty of crews already use it off duty.
Why Waze can’t route an emergency vehicle
It’s built for private cars. Waze’s own help pages say it was created for private cars, motorcycles and taxis, and that it doesn’t support lanes dedicated to public transport or lorries. There’s no emergency mode, so a response car gets an ordinary driver’s route: no bus gates, no bus lanes, no contraflow, and every no-right-turn treated as absolute.
Its speeds come from ordinary traffic. Waze learns road speeds from the drivers using it. That’s the right answer for a commuter. A vehicle on blue lights moves differently: it gets through traffic that a car would sit in, and it loses time on tight turns and narrow streets where traffic has nowhere to pull over. Blue Light Maps learns road speeds from anonymised telematics of emergency vehicles that have driven those roads on blue lights. That makes ETAs reflect how a response vehicle actually travels, and it steers routes towards roads that suit response driving: wider, with fewer turns.
It doesn’t know what you’re driving. The vehicle types are private, taxi and motorcycle. There’s nothing for the height of a fire appliance, the width of a carrier or the weight of an ambulance.
It needs signal. Waze says an active data connection is needed for everything to work. Blue Light Maps keeps the map and the route calculation on the device, so a rural job without coverage routes the same as one in town.
It’s a personal app. There’s no routing policy across a fleet, no incidents from CAD and no shared ETAs between crews.
How crews use Waze and Blue Light Maps together
On a call, crews navigate with Blue Light Maps in emergency mode. Blue Light Alert then puts their route into Waze automatically, so the drivers ahead are warned while the crew concentrates on the drive. No-one in the vehicle has to touch Waze at all.
Services deploy Blue Light Maps through MDM with vehicle profiles and routing policy already set. The usual next step is a 30-minute walkthrough, then a trial in your own area with your own crews, and no commitment until you’ve seen the results for yourself.