A driver cresting a hill on a country road usually learns a cyclist is ahead at the moment the cyclist appears. A feature announced on Nov. 10, 2026 tries to move that moment earlier: riders wearing certain Garmin devices can now appear as moving icons inside the Waze navigation app, so nearby drivers get an alert before a bike comes into view.
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Garmin, based in Olathe, Kansas, calls the arrangement a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Waze, the community-driven app that it says counts about 200 million drivers worldwide. The idea is simple, and so are the catches.
Live Cycling Alerts: how a rider becomes a dot on a driver’s map
The mechanism builds on Garmin’s existing LiveTrack function. According to Garmin’s announcement, a cyclist using a compatible Garmin Edge bike computer or Garmin smartwatch opts in through the Garmin Connect app, and sharing begins when an outdoor cycling activity starts and ends with the session. In Waze, nearby riders appear as moving icons on the road under the name Live Cycling Alerts, giving drivers a prompt to slow down and watch for them.
Garmin says the sharing is temporary, limited to the ride, and that a rider’s personal information is not shown in Waze. The release notes that sharing requires a compatible smartphone and the Garmin Connect app, and it says LiveTrack is free for compatible users. It gives no list of supported models, no regional rollout and no separate launch date for the Waze alerts, though it says cyclists can share their location now.
LiveTrack itself has been a way for friends and family to follow a rider’s races and training on a web page. Garmin’s owner documentation for the Edge Explore 2 describes it that way, alongside incident detection and an assistance function that messages emergency contacts. The Waze tie-in points the same location stream at strangers in cars instead of people on a contact list.
Garmin’s documentation for its bike computers adds a practical constraint worth knowing before anyone expects a cyclist to light up a map. The safety and tracking tools there depend on GPS being switched on and a Bluetooth link to the phone running Garmin Connect. A rider who leaves the phone at home, or whose sensors are not paired, would not broadcast anything to Waze, so the feature inherits every weak link of the existing LiveTrack chain.
The people at each company, and one skeptical reader
Susan Lyman, Garmin’s vice president of consumer sales and marketing, said the company is well-known in the cycling industry for its safety-focused products and features. Gai Berkovich, vice president and general manager of Waze, said safety is a top priority at his company and that Waze is glad to work with Garmin on the project, according to the release.
Electrek’s Micah Toll, who reported the launch, was positive: anything that gives drivers another chance to see cyclists before actually seeing them sounds to him like a win. A reader comment under the story pointed at the weakness. The alert only exists when the rider owns a compatible Garmin product and the driver runs Waze, so the overlap of the two groups sets the ceiling on how often the warning fires.
The 1,103 deaths behind the idea
The safety case rests on a stubborn number. NHTSA’s Traffic Safety Facts report on bicyclists and other cyclists, published in July 2026, counts 1,103 pedalcyclists killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2024, about 2.8 percent of all traffic fatalities. That is down 6 percent from 1,173 in 2023, a real improvement, yet it is still more than a thousand lives in a single year.
A navigation overlay addresses only one slice of how those crashes happen. It cannot help a driver who has Waze closed, a rider without a Garmin, or a collision at an intersection where the first sight line is already too late. What it can do is add a second warning channel on roads where drivers already glance at a phone-mounted map, which is where Waze sits in the car.
Cyclist deaths have also stayed high for years. A separate NHTSA early-estimate release, covered by Smart Cities Dive, put cyclist fatalities in the first half of 2024 about 1 percent below the same period of 2023, and reported that bicyclist deaths peaked in 2022 and remain higher than in any year back to 1994. Technology that gives drivers earlier notice is being asked to help against a long-running trend, not a one-year blip.
Whether the feature does any of that at scale depends on figures neither company has released: how many riders turn the sharing on, how many drivers see an alert on a typical ride, and whether the warnings reduce close passes. Until Garmin or Waze publishes usage data, the claim is a plausible design with a measurable goal and no measurement yet.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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