Last November I joined the Waze traffic and navigation community. I’ve been using Waze since then for my daily commute and also used it for our family’s Thanksgiving trip. My commute time is 35 minutes in one direction compared to the national average of 25 minutes.

It is now mid-February, three months later, and I’m a little surprised at how rapidly I’ve been able to progress in ranking. Just today I received the Waze Knight status, which means that I am in the top 4% of users in my state, North Carolina.

Thus far I have driven only 3,472 miles with Waze. The majority of my Waze points come from driving miles, although I have achieved a fairly normal set of bonus points (for example, using Waze four days out of one week). That is not a lot of activity to reach the top 4%!

If I’d had to guess, I would have expected that somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of Waze’s user base was fairly active. But from my experience, at least in North Carolina I would say that number must be less than 5% and could be much less than that. Now I’m very curious to see whether and how quickly I’m able to reach the top 1%.