In 2012, 65,000 Waze map editors made 500m edits, helping 36m drivers in 110 countries

Waze on Wednesday revealed a slew of figures for 2012 showing its mapping community is growing at a decent pace. Last year, 36 million drivers used the social GPS app to find their way around, sharing 90 million user reports as they drove 6 billion miles (9.66 billion kilometres).

At the same time, 65,000 map editors made a total of 500 million map edits and updated Waze’s map to reflect 1.7 million changes on the ground. All of this community-driven editing took place in 110 countries.

Furthermore, the company found at the end of the year that its community is fixing issues for themselves at record speeds. In December, new data revealed that map editors are resolving nearly 70 percent of system-detected map problems over a 30-day period and nearly all user-reported map problems are resolved within a week.

In fact, Waze’s user base is growing so close together that its members even meet up in real life. The company witnessed meetups, gatherings where users (and employees) discuss ideas for the local/regional communities, in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, and more.

While the US wasn’t mentioned explicitly, Waze did say that Americans loved the new gas station feature first launched stateside. Editors gained the ability to add gas stations to the map editor worldwide in July, and editors added more than 50,000 gas stations on the map in the first month. The company now says its real-time gas price feature is active in more than 20 countries. The same happened with the ability to add toll roads: map editors have marked more than 50,000 toll roads worldwide, and the ‘avoid toll roads’ feature is now available in countries such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, and so on.

All in all, it’s no wonder rumors about Apple looking to buy Waze got out of hand late last year.

See also – Apple did offer to buy Waze, but Waze politely declined and What is the deal with Apple and Waze? Poker

Image credit: Adrian van Leen