The Waze craze

I love Waze. And I hate it. Few global navigation systems can elicit those kinds of mixed feelings in me.

Waze has already changed people’s lives, those who drive in Manila where navigation has for so long been like throwing darts blindfolded at a Jackson Pollock canvas. We were blind, and now we see.

And hear: Waze tells us where to go. At first, we were happy with the MMDA’s phone app, with its color-coding to show us the red-hot traffic zones. But a number of inaccurate (wildly optimistic) readings led us to Waze. And Waze was so nice to us: it told us how to correct our mistakes, it informed us when to go left or right, and it encouraged us to start driving (“Let’s get started!”).

When you’re heading to, say, Baguio, Waze will even warn you about police traffic traps up ahead (though not fast enough for some, like my brother-in-law who quickly eased up on the gas and dropped his cruising speed as soon as Waze piped up; it’s just hard to go from 120 to 60 in the blink of an eye, so they bagged his license). Because Waze is supplemented by user information and updates constantly, it even tells you about road accidents and construction to avoid. It’s chatty, but not too chatty. 

Honestly, I recommend Waze for those trips when you just don’t know where the hell you’re going. Waze will find the quickest path for you, and even gently shepherd you back to the recommended route if you stray off the reservation. Waze is the driving software we’ve always dreamed about since K.I.T.T. appeared in Knight Rider.

But there’s a downside. Waze makes people stupid. Specifically, it erodes their ability to calculate distances and do simple math. What happens is, you punch in a destination, pay attention to the spoken directions (“Left in 20 meters…” “Right in 50 meters…”) and realize you don’t have any spatial sense of where you are. You just end up trusting the navigation, and turning the steering wheel.

This is supposed to be good, right? Except, like most technologies, people become too reliant on it. As in the case of digital calculators, where most people have forgotten how to do simple long division without one, Waze makes us mistrust our own human instincts. People used to acquire a sense of “dead reckoning” by learning to fix their current location based on markers, or previous positions. This would orientate them to their current location, how near or how far away they are.

Waze messes with all that instinct. It simply requires us to rely on technology. And instinct that doesn’t get used turns to brain fat (or something). I’m not a Luddite, exactly; I just like the idea that we humans can find our way out of a maze without some programmed voice calmly guiding us. Call it paranoia.

People become so reliant on Waze that they program in the simplest destination — say, two kilometers away from home. My wife did that recently, and I fumed to myself a little, thinking Haven’t I been driving to this same place for over a decade without a mobile phone helping me? So really, Waze is a threat to male pride more than anything else.

There are those who tell you Waze “teaches” you the best alternate routes. It does if you tend to keep a mental register while you’re driving. Except usually you don’t learn the route at all with Waze; as with most passengers who are being driven around, you take on a more passive role while being given directions. You ignore your own instincts, and wait for the next prompt.

Which is usually damned accurate, by the way. Waze is an Israeli-developed mobile application that goes beyond just GPS and map systems to include quick fixes to wrong turns; it reprograms your route, automatically, within seconds. So even slight bumps in the road — an inexplicably closed-off street, say — are dealt with in a stream of fresh navigational data. It even feeds back your driving data to the system, so Waze learns from your previous driving patterns and preferred routes.

That’s all good, and as I said before, I love Waze. In the future, we probably all have smart cars that drive us around, instead of us making boneheaded decisions. (This will free our hands to employ middle fingers against errant drivers in our midst.) In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with a system — a navigational buddy — that takes into consideration all the headaches that confront us on Manila’s streets. But I don’t use it every time I step out the door and behind the wheel. Sometimes I still like to take comfort in knowing that I can be wrong on my own. Stubborn, I guess.