Yeah, all the mapping programs (and dedicated GPS when I had it) want me to take a high traffic route with a dozen or so lights to trim almost three miles from my commute. I’m definitely not about that.
Three miles a day (only on one end of the committee cuz they all agree my way is better heading the other way) adds up but wear, tear, and fuel is better without all the extra stops.
And my stress level is more important than even those considerations.
I don’t really want my driving app to be like Wikipedia, where any yahoo can screw up my trip. Google Maps also allows you to submit map changes, but they’re checked out before they’re implemented.
Another place where Google Maps blows Waze out of the water, is its ability to tell you ahead of time, exactly what lane you need to be to make a turn or exit. It’s one thing to tell you turn left, it another to tell you you need to be in the second left turn lane, because you then will need to take the fork to the right.
But it doesn’t, as far as I know, have a way of seeing that the unexpected traffic jam you’re in is caused by an accident 2 miles ahead. Or if it does its deeply buried. Waze is so awesome for that. And saying things like “there’s a car on the shoulder in 100 yards” and then being right is eerily awesome.
I don’t know about most areas but in mine you have to grind doing parking lot editing to earn enough trust to do any damage. If your area is wide open to edits it may mean no human made any edits … Or it may mean some human did it badly and the editors in your community aren’t organized well enough to have caught the issue without it being reported. (Waze does automatic detection and flagging of issues so it may have detected the error but it needs human intervention to prevent making the issue worse.)
In either case, it’s easy to report an issue to have it addressed.
I’d offer to fix it for you but even if I had found parking lots in need of repair in order to “level up,” Waze doesn’t generally let you edit places that aren’t near to where you drive.
That used to be one of the major features of Waze – remember your favorite route and then show it compared to other routes… Perhaps that went away?
The thing that annoys me now is that they seem to have changed their routing algorithm sometime last year – it used to give me 3 good alternates, but now it gives one good alternate and 2 ridiculous ones. They seemed to switch from looking at “local” alternates to looking at “distant” alternates.
I have a huge problem with Waze. We have a lot of road closures, bridge and tunnel closures for construction. Or even the temporary road closures we have when a baseball game gets out. Some of them are only at certain times of the day or night. It used to be very easy to indicate that a road or tunnel was closed. Now I guess you have to go to map editor (on your laptop)-- and until then, Waze would keep trying to route you through the closed area (literally drove around in circles for 15 min because despite changing my route, Waze kept trying to route me through a tunnel that had closed an hour ago).
I wouldn’t mind so much except this is a chronic problem. What good is real time traffic data if it doesn’t include road closures??? And the best part is, that the algorithm will keep routing you through the closed are since there’s no traffic there!
Well I didn’t until I read your post.
Occasionally it will assume I’m taking the longer route, but usually it tries to send me over a toll bridge and onto a freeway where I have 1/4 mile to merge all the way across 4 lanes to immediately exit again. Not my idea of a good commute even if it does save me 10-15 minutes.
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