Show streets speeds all the time

by **MarcL20** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 3:40 am

Hi, I made a quick search on the forum and didnt find it.
A nice feature would be having the streets speeds all the time on the client map. I dont know if this is a bug, but when I report a traffic jam, only sometimes the speeds appear, and the worst: the traffic jam seems to be reported just for that little road segment between the 2 knots. Some traffic jams are very long and that mislead any traffic jam information while doing routes. We also cannot see when the traffic jam stops.

If waze could grab every user speed even without the traffic jam and plot on the map, would help us a lot by knowing that the speed average there is good.

We also could have some troubles if it works like that. For example, if someone stops on a store without parking lot, waze could think that he has slow speed and plot wrong speed info on clients. Waze could then popup a message asking if he is in a traffic jam (i think it already does that, but just for reports).
Other way to solve it could be to just plot speeds on "Primary streets", "freeways" and "highways".
Waze could also have 2 modes: The actual one and this new one.
The segment speed could be changed only if other waze passes thru there to update road speed or after a time limit of 1h or 2h. (It could plot a greyed-red to show us that it was slow 2 hours ago, same for green).

Another problem could be the 2 way roads. how to plot both speeds? If both are good, plain green. Only one way, how its plotted nowadays. If one is fast other slow, I think half arrows could move each direction in respective color. I dont know if this could make you feel dizzy. But these are only few ideas.
=====================================================================================
Ideas aside:
The thing is, waze could still work as it does now, but it should show us better where the traffic jams goes to. Not just on that segment.

Sorry if something is not good explained. I didnt read it again before sending.

by **gettingthere** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 3:44 pm

Waze absolutely does show the traffic jam speed with their automated traffic jam algorithms. When a Wazer is in traffic their actual speed is being sent back to Waze. After Waze processes the data and the client updates the data, the jam will show on the display and that data will be used for other Wazers who are on-route and calculating routes in the vicinity.

Yes, there are also false traffic jams generated by Wazers who are running the application and not travelling with the other cars on the road that they are snapped to (stopped for gas, drive-thru, etc). Yes, Waze should filter this data out better. In the meantime, turn off Waze when you are not driving with traffic to avoid your Waze client sending false data back to Waze.

The manual traffic reporting helps Waze to ensure that an automated jam is generated on the segment. But the manual report itself does not include the data that is needed to update the speed of the traffic jam and the manual report itself is not considered for routing purposes. So yes, report traffic via a report so that Waze knows that there is traffic there and will create a jam on that segment shortly afterwards.

Waze has no idea how long the traffic jam is until a Wazer drives through it. The Waze traffic jam data is community generated by Wazers driving. No Wazers = no traffic jams in the client.

As you noticed, Waze currently does not have a visual display for no traffic (green) like some other solutions have. They only show the slow downs. So it is difficult to know if a road with no jam is actually jam free or whether Waze just doesn't have up to date data. The more Wazers in your area = more accurate jams. I do not think that Waze should add a green traffic indicator on the roads unless the data is current. A suggestion would be to show the road as green if a Wazer has driven the segment less than maybe 10 minutes ago. Otherwise the segment should not have any traffic color coded indicator. Many of the other navigation solutions that show the roads as green are either tied into the in-road sensors which offer constant up to date information or have many more data points to update their traffic displays.

Per Waze - their solution can show traffic on any road, not only freeways, highways and primary roads. But you are correct, there is a lot of false jam data being generated on these lower class roads - or any road with POI's to stop at.

I have offered several suggestions in the forums for Waze to better filter out false jams. But is seems that they are not yet concerned with it. So the only reasonable option at this time is to educate other Wazers to turn Waze off when they are stopped at a POI.

Waze has offered up other solutions to this issue such as mapping Parking Lot Roads and Parking Lot Landmarks which suppress jams when a Wazer is within these map elements. But it is unreasonable for the map editors to landmark every single square inch of POI's and Parking Lots that adjoin every road world-wide. Stupid actually.... Waze needs to improve their logic and fix this problem in other ways.

by **RallyChris** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 4:36 pm

Also understand, that waze only shows higher than normal traffic. Which is a different model from the highway sensor style traffic alerts from other companies.

So if the traffic level is normal (always bad

) then their might not be a traffic alert, as the real speed and average speed for that time of day are close. That is why it is recommended to use navigation, as the routing server is supposed to take into account historical averages, and real time data from other wazers for routing. If their is enough data for faster alternatives, then navigation will try to take those into account, and route around the "normal" traffic, without the need for an "alert".

"Drive what you see" unfortunately is not the best method to use with this product.

by **gettingthere** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 6:08 pm

RallyChris wrote:"Drive what you see" unfortunately is not the best method to use with this product.

Very good point! Since many competitors do not support re-routing when traffic changes when on a route, the user is accustomed to scanning the map, and manually adjusting the route. Most humans cannot accurately calculate the fastest route in this way since there are so many variables.

This is really the power and benefit of Waze. If it's working as designed, you should set a route and trust that Waze is taking you the fastest (or shortest depending on your client setting) way which factors in traffic. You should not have to be concerned with having to manually adjust your route based on the traffic jam speeds or color coding.

by **MarcL20** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:11 pm

its a bug then? I often go thru jams and waze does not update further road segments. It only changes to red the segment which i reported.

by **onezerosix141** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 8:22 pm

There's a road not close to where live always have indication of slow traffic but more than 90% of the time there is no traffic. I wonder if it's caused by someone have it running without driving...

by **gettingthere** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:08 pm

onezerosix141 wrote:There's a road not close to where live always have indication of slow traffic but more than 90% of the time there is no traffic. I wonder if it's caused by someone have it running without driving...

Very common. They could be in a drive thru, walking around their office building, etc..

by **gettingthere** » Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:14 pm

MarcL20 wrote:its a bug then? I often go thru jams and waze does not update further road segments. It only changes to red the segment which i reported.

It depends on a lot of factors - some of which we don't understand fully since we are users of the system, not the developers. If the traffic jam is moving at 40mph and the average speed of that segment at that time of day is 40mph, Waze may not show it as a jam - even though the posted speed limit may be 65 mph. So to you, it's a traffic jam. But to Waze, it's not a jam since the traffic speed is the same as the time of day average.

Waze is analyzing the traffic of each segment as mapped. If you report traffic, Waze has stated that it gives double weight to a jam being created on that segment. But as you say, the double weighting seems to only be relevant to the segment where you placed the report. So if you commonly run into situations where adjacent segments don't update with the jam (may not update until several minutes later), try doing a manual report on each segment. Of course you should not have to place any manual reports since Waze should be doing all of this automatically...

by **MarcL20** » Fri Mar 16, 2012 4:47 am

Maybe its really associated to the speed waze has set in cartouche. Is there a way to set those speeds to actual road speed limits? Maybe waze is not showing slow roads because the real road speed is low and since its low and the traffic is slow, to waze, there is no jam.

by **AlanOfTheBerg** » Fri Mar 16, 2012 4:54 am

As long as we have Wazers driving through at (nearly) all hours of the day, Waze knows what the speeds could/should be. If it isn't taking the actual max road speed when calculating a jam notification, it should be.