How To Use Waze Railroad Crossing Alerts (Turn On/Off)

Waze has recently introduced a new alert to its already impressive navigation features. Now you’re notified when you’re approaching a railroad crossing. The feature has initially rolled out to the United States, Canada and Belgium.
At the time of writing it’s also available in Brazil, Mexico, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Israel, Romania and others.

Railroad crossing alerts are enabled by default. They pop up, during navigation, at the top of the Waze app when the driver is 500 meters (0.3 miles) away from a railway crossing.
This alert can be life saving when traveling on unknown roads or in countries that have a less developed infrastructure.
Railroad crossings that are poorly signalized can cause lots of deadly accidents.

How To Get Waze Railroad Crossing Alerts

The popular Google-owned navigation app is set to enable railway crossing notifications by default. This means that they’re not available in your country yet if you’re not getting them.
What you can do is make sure that you use the latest version of Waze for iOS or Android.
You can also check the Waze settings to make sure that you haven’t accidentally turned them off in the past. Follow these steps:
1. Open Waze on your iPhone, iPad or any other Android smartphone.
2. Tap on the Search icon, available in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
3. Press the Settings icon. top-left corner of the screen.
4. Select Map display.
5. Tap on Reports, in the ‘View on map’ section.
6. Select Railroad crossing.
7. Railway crossing alerts are enabled when the ‘Alert me while driving’ toggle is switched to the ON position.

How To Turn Off Waze Railroad Crossing Alerts

Use the same steps listed above to disable the railway crossing notifications.
Important: If you have railroad crossings in your daily commuting route you might find the new railway crossing alerts annoying. However, we strongly suggest you not to turn this feature off, because you might forget that you disabled it when you change your route and might actually need it.
If you do decide to turn them off, keep at least the ‘Show on map’ option enabled! This way you will notice the railroad crossings only if you glance at your device.

Do you get alerts from Waze when you’re about to cross a railroad? Let us know in the comments section available below. Do mention your country. This way we can track the worldwide availability of this new feature.

Related: Here is how to avoid road tolls when navigating with Waze!