Traffic jam as Waze mistakenly declares J’lem-TA road closed

A Waze navigation application employee accidentally diverted hundreds of drivers and caused major traffic delays after erroneously reporting the main Tel-Aviv Jerusalem highway was closed on Wednesday morning.

Drivers relying on the application were told to avoid Route 1 and take the alternate Route 443.

The result was bumper-to-bumper traffic jams on 443.

Waza said in a statement the mishap was a matter of “human error” and was fixed as soon as it was brought to the company’s attention.

“We apologize to the drivers whose travels were affected by this in the morning, and we will hone our procedures to prevent a future recurrence of the error,” it said.

Illustrative photo of Israeli cars driving through a checkpoint on Route 443 in the West Bank (Gili Yaari/Flash90)

Navigation apps were blamed for a spate of incidents in the past year in which soldiers were diverted into Palestinian areas.

In September, two female soldiers entered Tulkarem and sustained mild injuries from rocks thrown at them before they were rescued by local Palestinian police and Defense Ministry officials. An initial probe of that incident revealed that not only had the two soldiers relied on a navigation app, but they had entered Tulkarem unarmed.

In the most serious incident so far, in February 2016, one Palestinian was killed and several injured in clashes in the Qalandiya refugee camp near Jerusalem sparked by an attempt to rescue lost soldiers who had used Waze.

Each time, the IDF repeats the importance of not relying solely on traffic navigation apps such as Waze.