Daymilo

How to add multiple stops in Waze

·5 min read

Waze is the app drivers trust for traffic, and the one that surprises them most when a day gets busy. It takes exactly one stop per route. Not nine, not fourteen. One. Here is what to do about it.

Short answer

Waze lets you add one stop to a route, and that stop is inserted before your final destination. To stop somewhere else after that, you start a new drive.

This is not a bug or an oversight. Waze is built around a single trip with live traffic and community reports, not around a working day with a list of addresses. Once you see it that way, the way to use it becomes obvious.

How to add the one stop Waze allows

A few limits worth knowing before you rely on this. Stops cannot be removed once added when you are using CarPlay. Adding a stop is not supported on the Waze Live Map in a browser. And the stop always goes before the destination, never after.

Why only one stop

Waze optimizes for a different thing than a route planner does. Its strength is the minute by minute picture of the road: police reports, crashes, sudden slowdowns, closures posted by other drivers a few minutes ahead of you.

That model assumes you are going somewhere specific and want the best way to get there right now. A delivery day inverts the assumption: you know all the places, the question is what order to take them in. Waze has never tried to answer that question, and it does not pretend to.

Stop order: 48 mi versus 33 miThe same stops. Driven in list order it is 48 mi, in the computed order 33 mi.The order the app drivesThe way you entered them12345648 miThe computed orderThe way that costs less12345633 mi→
Six stops in the order they were entered, then the same six in a computed order.

What the limit costs on a real day

Six addresses entered in the order the jobs came in run 48 miles. The same six in a computed order run 33 miles, which is 32 percent shorter.

With Waze you never even see that comparison, because you are driving the addresses one at a time. Each individual leg is routed beautifully. The day as a whole is whatever order you happened to pick.

That is the honest cost of the one stop limit: not bad navigation, but no plan.

The workaround people use, and what it costs

The common workaround is to drive the day as a chain of separate Waze trips: finish a job, search the next address, tap Go. It works, and thousands of drivers do exactly that.

What it costs you is everything that depends on seeing the whole list at once:

Plan first, then drive in Waze

The pattern that actually works is to separate the two jobs. Work out the order somewhere that can take the whole list, then drive the stops one at a time in Waze, which is what it is good at.

Done that way you keep the live traffic and the community reports, and you lose the part where you stand at a customer's door deciding where to go next.

When Waze is the wrong tool

Waze stops being the right choice as soon as the question changes from "how do I get there" to "where do I go first". Concrete signs:

When Waze is exactly right

It is worth being fair about this. Waze is the better app when the trip is one drive and the road is the problem: a commute that changes with traffic, a long highway run, an unfamiliar city at rush hour, or anywhere a crash or a closure could cost you half an hour.

FAQ

How many stops can I add in Waze?

One. Waze supports a single stop per route, placed before your final destination. For another stop you start a new drive.

Does Waze optimize the order of stops?

There is no order to optimize. With one stop and one destination there are only two points to visit, and Waze drives them in that fixed sequence.

Can I remove a stop after adding it?

On the phone, yes. In CarPlay, no: stops cannot be removed from a route once they have been added.

Can I plan a multi stop route on the Waze website?

No. Adding a stop is not supported on the Waze Live Map, so the browser version is not a route planner.

Is Waze worse than Google Maps for deliveries?

For a working day, yes, and by a wide margin: nine stops against one. For a single trip in heavy traffic, many drivers still prefer Waze.

What is the best way to run a delivery day with Waze?

Decide the order before you leave using something that accepts the full list, then drive the stops one by one in Waze. You get the plan and the traffic reports at the same time.

Keep reading

How to add multiple stops in Apple Maps Adding stops on iPhone, Mac and CarPlay, the fourteen stop ceiling in Apple's own help, and why Apple Maps drives your list in the order you typed it. Turn a spreadsheet of addresses into a route Three ways to get a column of addresses out of Excel or Google Sheets and into a driving route, how to clean the column first, and which method survives a list of thirty. How to add multiple stops in Google Maps Add stops on your phone and on a computer, why the route caps out at nine stops plus your start, and why Google Maps never puts those stops in a smarter order. Google Maps vs Apple Maps vs Waze for multi stop days Which map app to use when the day is a list of addresses rather than one trip: stop limits, sequencing, traffic quality and the thing none of the three will do for you. How many stops can you add in each map app The stop limits in Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze and MapQuest side by side, how to check your own limit in a minute, and what splitting a day actually costs in miles. MapQuest route planner and multiple stops MapQuest is the one free map service that will reorder your stops for you. How the route planner works, where its ceiling sits, and the jobs it still cannot do. How to plan a 20 stop delivery route What a bad stop order costs on twenty addresses, why grouping by neighborhood only gets you halfway, and how to build the whole day in about five minutes. How to plot multiple addresses on a map Put a whole list of addresses on one map without building a route: the fastest way to do it, what the picture tells you that a list cannot, and how to spot a bad address. Why navigation apps never reorder your stops Every map app finds the best road between two points and none of them choose which point to visit first. Two different problems, the second one genuinely hard, and what it costs your day.