Road Closed - Waze becomes useless

by **olestas** » Sat Jan 26, 2013 11:12 pm

Yep, fast temporary road closure is needed. We had some celebrations on huge segment of one of main roads, and waze kept trying to take me there, as THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC there. And for some bad reason there were no alternatives for this route. Possibly because there was big traffic on all other streets while none on the closed one.

by **davipt** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 12:09 am

olestas wrote:Yep, fast temporary road closure is needed. We had some celebrations on huge segment of one of main roads, and waze kept trying to take me there, as THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC there. And for some bad reason there were no alternatives for this route. Possibly because there was big traffic on all other streets while none on the closed one.

Unfortunately according to my tests and usage waze provides only a single route when the destination is nearby enough, which makes this road-close case even worse. Waze should always provide three alternatives, even if the 2nd and 3rd one may be, according to the client algorithms, much worse than the first one. Give me the alternatives, let me choose where to go.

by **andrewkjs** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 9:05 am

davipt wrote:Unfortunately according to my tests and usage waze provides only a single route when the destination is nearby enough, which makes this road-close case even worse. Waze should always provide three alternatives, even if the 2nd and 3rd one may be, according to the client algorithms, much worse than the first one. Give me the alternatives, let me choose where to go.

+1 I've also been annoyed with only being given one route for destinations that are a few KM away when I press the Routes button, even when I know that the single route is closed / unavailable.

by **davipt** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 10:48 am

andrewkjs wrote:
davipt wrote:Unfortunately according to my tests and usage waze provides only a single route when the destination is nearby enough, which makes this road-close case even worse. Waze should always provide three alternatives, even if the 2nd and 3rd one may be, according to the client algorithms, much worse than the first one. Give me the alternatives, let me choose where to go.

+1 I've also been annoyed with only being given one route for destinations that are a few KM away when I press the Routes button, even when I know that the single route is closed / unavailable.

Or even worst in my case, it always gives me the last 500m route that is never the one I take every single day to arrive home, so the client is not learning anything. I've double checked everything on those remaining segments and everything is ok but the one I want has more junctions and is longer, but in practice is faster because the other one crosses a painful red light that is open just some 15 seconds.

by **davipt** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 3:29 pm

DG567 wrote:Why? You ask. Because when you are driving, it's dangerous to be fiddling about trying to plan a route using the stop hack. A big 'road blocked' button that forces a sensible re-route is safer. If I'm on a freeway and the sign says it's blocked after next junction, I can't stop to re-route.

I didn't say it was a bad idea to have the feature to report blocked streets, I'm just saying it's not a reason to switch from waze to other app when the feature can be simulated if planned accordingly.

One thing that Waze also needs to improve is to have a way to report stuff in segments nearby and not just on the exact place we're in right now. The closed road (or accident or police or any other thing) may be in another segment that we haven't passed through or we couldn't press the button at the right time (specially with the police case), and reporting on the wrong point then becomes worthless. One particular case I have is entering a roundabout and having one of the streets with something to report but being forced to leave through a different exit, and then if I report something the report would appear either on the roundabout or only later on the wrong segment.

This said I'm now curious how other apps implement this case. Like you say, if you go on the freeway and see a detour sign, reporting a closed road would probably close the street you are in, which is not closed. How to solve this?

by **jasonh300** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 3:43 pm

In the old Garmin, you only used the Detour button if the next leg of your route was unusable.

Of course, it didn't report that to anyone else. I'm not sure if this feature should do that in Waze either.

by **AlanOfTheBerg** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 3:48 pm

davipt wrote:
andrewkjs wrote:+1 I've also been annoyed with only being given one route for destinations that are a few KM away when I press the Routes button, even when I know that the single route is closed / unavailable.

Or even worst in my case, it always gives me the last 500m route that is never the one I take every single day to arrive home,

Remember that you have to drive the routes Waze wants you to in order for it to route you most efficiently. It likely doesn't have the right data for the route it is recommending yet.

by **davipt** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 3:51 pm

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:
davipt wrote:
andrewkjs wrote:+1 I've also been annoyed with only being given one route for destinations that are a few KM away when I press the Routes button, even when I know that the single route is closed / unavailable.

Or even worst in my case, it always gives me the last 500m route that is never the one I take every single day to arrive home,

Remember that you have to drive the routes Waze wants you to in order for it to route you most efficiently. It likely doesn't have the right data for the route it is recommending yet.

It's the route I drive every single day for more than one year. There was a time the client may have been learning, but right now I'm pretty sure it's not learning anything. My guess is that it forgets everything on every mapdate, and having mapdates more frequently invalidates the learning and explains why it felt it was learning something when mapdates were taking more than one month.

Edit: livemap is broken, tells me "no road found" everywhere, so I can't even send a livemap link

by **jasonh300** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 4:23 pm

davipt wrote:It's the route I drive every single day for more than one year. There was a time the client may have been learning, but right now I'm pretty sure it's not learning anything. My guess is that it forgets everything on every mapdate, and having mapdates more frequently invalidates the learning and explains why it felt it was learning something when mapdates were taking more than one month.

It won't learn unless you drive the suggested route a few times and show Waze that it's not the fastest route.

by **davipt** » Sun Jan 27, 2013 4:32 pm

jasonh300 wrote:
davipt wrote:It's the route I drive every single day for more than one year. There was a time the client may have been learning, but right now I'm pretty sure it's not learning anything. My guess is that it forgets everything on every mapdate, and having mapdates more frequently invalidates the learning and explains why it felt it was learning something when mapdates were taking more than one month.

It won't learn unless you drive the suggested route a few times and show Waze that it's not the fastest route.

I'll say again, they are two routes near home I drive every single day (even weekends when it's not raining too much). When mapdates were monthly, the route would switch to the one I wanted after some days. Now it doesn't anymore. All segments are correct. I can eventually measure the averages and count the junctions on each of them, but there is not much I can do - can't delete junctions nor change the road type. In one case I drive my route (the one not picked) every single day while part of the wrong route (a whole roundabout turn back and a very slow - avg 8Km/h segment) is driven almost every day by a colleague of mine, so there's not lack of average data on them.