Are Google Maps Incident Reports Too Distracting? [Poll]

Last year, Google Maps finally added Waze-style reporting for incidents along the road, but some argue they’re more of a safety hazard than anything else. What do you think?

Incident reporting in Google Maps has been around for a few years now, but was given a big overhaul in 2024. New report types were added alongside more prominent notices and, finally, support for Android Auto and CarPlay. Towards the end of the year, Google even started integrating Waze reports into Maps.

The new system was met with excitement, but it’s also drawn criticism over time.

This week, Fast Company argued that incident reports in Google Maps are doing more harm than good. The core of the argument seems to be around pop-ups in Maps that appear when the driver approaches an area where an incident is reported. As has been the case with Waze for years, the pop-up alerts the driver of police, a stalled vehicles, or other potential hazards and asks them if the hazard is still there. After about 10 seconds or so – sometimes longer – the pop-up disappears whether you’ve interacted with it or not.

The article goes on to cite experts in the field who argue that the pop-ups “[make] you feel like you have to respond or get it off of your screen.” Specifically, the problem argued is that these pop-ups are too invasive, with a chime emitted when the alert pops-up, and the movement of your typical navigation directions moved out of the way for the sake of this new alert.

It’s an understandable complaint (and not a new one at that), as Google Maps currently has no way to disable incident report pop-ups. They’re enabled by default and the only thing you can do to lessen the distraction is turn off the alert chimes, but that requires turning off vocal navigation directions entirely.

Personally, I’ve really come to enjoy incident reports in Google Maps, though I could do with a few less “stalled car” alerts while I’m driving. At the very least, it’d be nice to be able to granularly decide what road hazards I get these larger alerts about instead of getting all of them all of the time.

What do you think?