Tom Tom etc.

[daknife]

Start pushing it on all your friends, getting the word out is the only way to improve the service. Oh that and edit like crazy to make sure Waze knows there are alternate routes that work.

[daknife]

Umm due to the low user base in your area Waze may need to keep up with apple, but in most areas it's still definitely the other way around.

[daknife]

Yep, that and keep editing, it seems there's a magic level of road quality in an area. When the roads need a lot of fixing people try it and quit. But once the roads hit a certain threshold of usefulness, usage in an area starts climbing fast.

For example: several months ago when I first got CM status I responded to an UR in my area about a problem on a trip to Las Vegas. I pulled up LV and it was a mass of UR's, but when I pulled up the GPS tracks, once you got off the freeways going through the city the tracks practically disappeared. People were trying waze, getting bad routes, making a few UR's and then bailing. As far as I could tell there were no active editors in the metropolitan area. So I went to work, after a few weeks of spending the majority of my time working those maps, GPS tracks started appearing on more and more side roads, and then I started running across other editors working the city. Now days when I happen to look in, UR's are less common and rarely more than a couple days old, And GPS tracks are far more widely found than when I first wandered into the area.

I've seen the same or similar thing happen in the Reno/Carson City NV area as well in a few smaller cities in Utah.

[daknife]

As to the map editor never having you driving. Make sure you are logging into the correct server.

[hohum3001]

waze is nearly useless in most parts of Sydney Australia because there's not enough users yet. But waze has wet my appetite for traffic avoidance now & I'm thinking of going & getting a tom tom as a commercial service.

Anyone got experience with tom tom in a waze poor area? Is it any good? Does waze offer stuff tom tom doesn't?

Would it be possible, if I paid some kind of subscription fee or something, for waze to integrate tom tom's data? Or is that just too complex?

iOS Apple maps sucks, but it won't forever.

[hohum3001]

iOS Apple maps sucks, but it won't forever.

You think so, do you?

They couldn't possibly continue to suck so hard could they?

[hohum3001]

Today waze sucked for me. No help at all, & lots of traffic stuck everywhere. Need more wazers Apple Maps was more useful. My wife tells me it uses tom tom data. At least waze would be happy to know that our Roads & Traffic Authority's app was less useful than tits on a bull.

[hohum3001]

Start pushing it on all your friends, getting the word out is the only way to improve the service. Oh that and edit like crazy to make sure Waze knows there are alternate routes that work.

Yeah, I push it hard already but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference - for the last week or so there were practically no wazers on the major Sydney routes I was on. There's 5 million people in this city; if you picked it up and up put it in America it'd be like the 11th largest city or something (or so I've heard). We're not that small. But waze just hasn't caught on here.

Yesterday I actually forgot to turn waze on. I'm sold on the idea & I'm a 100% fanatic. And I forgot. Knowing myself well eventually I will stop using it altogether & it'll just be one of life's disappointments. And the reason will be that while I believed in it, and wanted to support it, @ the end of the day it just didn't have enough users to make it work.

A very wize friend of mine once told me to never bring a problem without also bringing a solution. So what I'd say is then is this: given I'm willing to pay for Tom Tom data that I can get via Apple Maps for free, then if waze licensed that data - or maybe data from several sources - to keep up with Apple Maps at the very least - then waze might be more useful - and I'd pay a subscription for that. Or waze needs to find another way to distinguish itself. Nobody ever chats in Sydney - how can you chat & drive? So the social networking part isn't working quite so well here. What else can waze do that nobody else does? Petrol prices - that's a good one - though not really applicable here in Aus. Police is good, but heck I can't report that while I'm driving! Deals? Combine with groupon or something for discount vouchers? "You're passing McDonalds - quote voucher XYZ for a free Little Mac"? I dunno. I suppose that with 20 million users you're not that worried about little old Sydney.

btw - the tom tom data via Apple Maps also sucked a few times. So it seems that I'm just stuck.

[hohum3001]

Umm due to the low user base in your area Waze may need to keep up with apple, but in most areas it's still definitely the other way around.

that's good to know daknife but it does't help me I suppose I can cope with being one of the insignificant

[hohum3001]

People were trying waze, getting bad routes, making a few UR's and then bailing.

For me that's not an issue because I don't use waze for navigation, what I want waze for is traffic avoidance. So when waze tells me to go in to the centre of Sydney and spent hours sitting around in traffic when there's a major route off Sydney harbour on to the Anzac bridge, I just PMSL and drive on. I have tried to get in and work out the problem but it's really difficult because there are multiple levels and lanes that our traffic authority can program so that the lanes can be one way either way depending on demand. I also changed it so that you CAN follow Livingstone Road, Marrickville NSW south of Marrickville Road north, but then the map seemed to revert? It was bizarre. I'll give it another try.

It just tweeted again for people to please join & even suggested to some major tv stations here that they do a story on waze.