In my experience, I find that Waze seems to underestimate the time cost of intersections. I think that's why it is more willing to route you through local streets than its competitors.
I find it overestimates traffic lights sometimes, on a medium road next to a grid neighborhood to turn right on another medium road, generally has you cut the corner by one block to avoid the light, even if you can't ever make it out into traffic before the light changes anyway.
Try and safely pay attention to wazes route and ignore it sometimes, but it's generally correct.
And you can send audio prompts to a phone speaker instead of Bluetooth, unlike gmaps, so that's also useful.
