That's it for me, too. And damn it's effective.

About two years ago I had an opportunity to run a "for fun" experiment. My family and another family went on vacation together but I had to come home a couple of days early due to business travel. Because of vehicle sizes, I ended up taking the other car home -- which was a small luxury SUV with a high-end radar detector ... somewhere inside the damn thing[1]. I had Waze up. For whatever reason, between two different states, the roads were teaming with traffic enforcement. When I stopped to fill up, I grabbed a small notebook and a pen and kept score: Radar/Waze with ticks under "Cop Missed", "Cop Found", "False Positive". The radar was worthless. It had lower false-positives than I'd expected (I remember those things going off all the time for nothing) but when it went off, it went off too late. It missed more than half of them.

Waze, on the other hand, had very few false positives. I suspect some that I marked "false positive" were really me failing to see the police officer[2]. This was "8-hours of highway (non-turnpike/toll)" and there was a police officer every 5 miles (I went 2, maybe 3 pages in tick marks on a hand-sized spiral-bound $0.99 gas station notepad). I don't even know that I bothered calculating everything out completely. For one, Waze did not miss a single speed trap that entire drive. Where I live (metro to a major mid-west city), it's rare that I'm the first reporter or that I see a cop that Waze isn't alerting me about already.

Beyond police, the reports for disabled vehicles (by law you must move one lane over where I live) is very helpful for both "ticket avoidance" and safety (if you care enough to follow the rules).

I prefer the Google Maps interface -- and generally everything else about it over Waze, but I use Waze 99.9% of the time and for every drive. I have it setup to not speak the directions because much of the time I'm traveling to places that I am very familiar with the routes (I might follow a suggestion over my own preference, though, because "Waze tends to be more right"). I use it, entirely, for the social reporting features. Though Maps, at one point, added this (is it still there?) it wasn't even close to the quality of that provided by Waze. I'm really hoping they "put the social features into Maps" and I'll switch to maps or "move the UI more toward Maps in Waze" and I'll continue using Waze.

[0] For context, I'm not an aggressive driver ... I don't drive that much any longer as it is so I tend to be a lot more cautious these days. But it's way too easy to not notice a 10-15 MPH speed limit change accidentally and driving laws are among the small set of laws that are more often broken unintentionally, than intentionally.

[1] I would have had no idea what the insane beeping was all about but it was a brand that a friend of mine owned growing up and I recognized the tone ... but he had it installed in a manner that it you'd never know there was one in the car except for the sound (they're illegal in Canada which they traveled to frequently). It was a very expensive model outfitted with the latest Radar Detector Detector Detector Detector Detector (odd or even number, I can't remember). I had no idea how to silence it so I was afraid I'd get pulled over and guarantee myself a ticket for having it.

[2] Where I live, on-ramps make great speed traps. If positioned just so, you can't see them until they're behind you, and you can't see them in your passenger mirror at all if it's a typical mirror/aimed the way most drivers aim them -- requiring you to turn your head to locate them (something you're probably not in the habit of doing while chilling at highway speeds).