Waze Unveils Motorcycle-Specific Navigation

For years, traffic apps users have viewed our Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) with skepticism, and rightly so. Motorcycles are allowed in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane in most states, meaning we can skip a large portion of traffic, but there has never been an option to select that in your nav, until now.

To our knowledge, Waze is the first app to offer an HOV option when designating a route for your travel, but that's not all it's doing for motorcyclists with this update. Selecting "Motorcycle" as your main mode of transportation will change your routes to those "optimized for motorcyclists based on where fellow Wazers-on-wheels are riding." The company says that the more you ride in the motorcycle setting, the more the app will learn preferred motorcycle routes and "the smarter the routing will become."

To change your vehicle type on Waze go to Settings>Navigation>Vehicle Type>Motorcycle

We spent some time riding around using the Waze app in Motorcycle setting to run errands around town for an hour and honestly, it’s hard to tell if it’s doing anything differently. The HOV integration is a huge improvement, and we expect to see more conveniences gained from that than from piggy-backing off other motorcyclists’ routes, but time will tell!

In the United States, HOV route support is currently available to Wazers in:

Waze was developed in 2006 as FreeMap Israel, and was acquired by Google in 2013. Get more information on the new motorcycle functionality from Blog.Waze.com