Waze is going to make your driving experience a little less hazardous with their new feature that’s designed to help you avoid “difficult intersections”.
Driving is hard, or that’s what people always say. Sometimes you arrive at really complicated intersections with no traffic lights, no signboards and cars coming from every direction.
What do you do? Panic, usually, especially when there are impatient people behind you honking at your inability to muster up some courage and slowly edge your way out into the crossroads/complicated intersection. At this point, I would like to apologise as I’m probably one of those impatient drivers.
If you don’t want to deal with all that precarious driving, popular social navigation application Waze will now give you the option to avoid these intersections. At least, avoid as many as possible.
The Google-owned application says that their new “difficult intersections” feature is designed to reduce the number of difficult intersections you would encounter per trip. But if avoiding the difficult intersection would add too much time to your commute, the app will choose to send you through a few to save time.
I’m not entirely sure that this is the right move for KL/PJ though. You see, when I first started driving, I was very afraid of everything. Switching lanes, crossroads, roundabouts, etc.
But as time went on and I was forced to drive into more and more of these complicated intersections that were filled with impatient drivers and speeding monsters, I gained confidence.
When you’re forced into a situation like that, you’re only options are to fake a breakdown and break down in your car, frozen in fear, or you muster up what courage you have and push out into the sea of madness. In a way, it’s a crucible. A gauntlet where you are molded into a driver capable of surviving the hazardous streets of KL.
I was born in it, moulded by it and I’d like to think that I came out a better, or at least a more confident, driver.
Of course, I’m not dismissing this feature entirely. This feature can be incredibly useful for people who are travelling in unfamiliar places. For example, people from suburban areas visiting KL/PJ for the first time. If it isn’t somewhere you’re going to frequent, opting for the safer route is probably the wiser choice so that you’d reduce the risk of missing your exits or turnings. Since it’s an optional feature, you can turn it off or on whenever you see fit.
Right now, this feature has been enabled in Los Angeles and will be rolling out to New Orleans and the rest of the world eventually. What do you think of this feature? Would you use it when you it comes to Malaysia?
