We're not sure why it took so long to implement, but Google Maps users can now see Waze's (arguably superior) crowd-sourced incident report markers on their navigation routes. Don't worry, this doesn't mean a death knell for the Google-owned Waze service, but no doubt, having such rich incident report data on Google Maps could bring new users over from Apple Maps and even Waze.

As a user on Reddit shows in a screenshot, the Google Maps incident report card shows how "Police reported ahead" is attributed to "Waze drivers". The user then has the option to indicate if the report is still accurate or not. Note that the term "Police" comes from a recent Maps update that replaced "Speed trap" to the aforementioned noun.

This Google Maps update is huge in that it combines incident data from Maps (with 2 billion active users) and Waze (with 151 million users). The latter may have a significantly smaller userbase, but because the Waze app has mostly been centered around community engagement through things like points, likes, and conversational reporting, it arguably pulls in more reliable and frequent crowd-sourced info than its sister service.

In terms of incident reports, another area where Waze might have a leg up over Maps is that the former allows users to disable reports and notifications for each data point. Right now, no such granular controls are available to Google Maps users.

So far, the new feature seems to be trickling to the public gradually. Also unclear is what regional availability is going to be like, so stay tuned!