Learning?

[AlanOfTheBerg]

Now, to this day, there is still a route I prefer to take which is slower than the fastest route. I know it is, but it doesn't go over a mountain which is often slippery with ice or snow and unexpected accidents. So, every morning, I do still need to select my preferred route from the alternate routes list.

In this case you actually don't need routing at all.

Yes and no. I know where I'm going, but I don't know road conditions ahead on my route.

Waze cannot alert you to changing traffic conditions like an accident which is causing a roadway to slow to 0mph or so if you aren't navigating. It has no chance to preemptively reroute you if not in nav mode. About once a week, I get the "found a faster route" message. And sometimes "traffic building up ahead" which lets me know the ETA has adjusted later, but the route should still be the fastest one.

[stlninx]

I think I am in the same boat here. There are three subdivisions off a major road where I live. I live in the middle one. Waze alwaze wants to take me through the first one. When I turn onto my street it looses me and thinks it needs to route me to the 3rd one. (mine is in the middle) The point is that I turn into mine every day 5 days a week and it still doesnt learn that I am not going in #1 or #3.

[AlanOfTheBerg]

I think I am in the same boat here. There are three subdivisions off a major road where I live. I live in the middle one. Waze alwaze wants to take me through the first one.

Care to post a permalink to this area so someone can check for map issues?

[kentsmith9]

In my route to work, getting off the freeway has two routes that are possible. What appears to be the shorter of the two is what Waze "usually" uses, but I never take that route because sometimes I find heavier traffic on part of it and there is a long light required for a left turn. When I take my route it of course will recalc to my route and show my distance increased by 0.5 miles, but the time is about the same. Because my route does not have that left turn light I don't stop driving. I hate to wait.

Periodically (1 per week or few weeks) Waze will select the route I always take. At those times I can see there is usually heavier traffic on the normal route. So I know Waze will take an alternate route based on traffic. I guess the route it proposes is actually faster most of the time, but psychologically I like not stopping.

Note that there are a few times I have seen it route me a 3rd direction further down the freeway. I usually find no issue with my normal route, so I am not sure why it ever selects that route over mine.

[foxitrot]

Note that there are a few times I have seen it route me a 3rd direction further down the freeway. I usually find no issue with my normal route, so I am not sure why it ever selects that route over mine.

Give it a try then you'll possibly know.

[yrrabsille]

So, today I left for work from a friends house. I had in my mind a certain route that I thought would be best and I assumed that Waze would probably pick it. Nope. Waze just wanted to go to the highway. But I thought that it would probably be not much different to go either way so I decided to skip the turn to the highway. It recalculated and took an entire eight minutes off of the destination time. That's huge. I can't say it enough, Waze puts way too much priority on the highways. At this point I have very little confidence that Waze ever chooses the fastest route unless the fastest route happens to be the highway. And in New England, that's not always true.
And I consider the maps in this area to be very good.

[AlanOfTheBerg]

So, today I left for work from a friends house. I had in my mind a certain route that I thought would be best and I assumed that Waze would probably pick it. Nope. Waze just wanted to go to the highway...

We talked about routing via road type preference at the US meetup. We shared examples, and some pretty striking examples or Waze routing bad choices, and some complete failures when it comes to the drive-distance-to-direct-distance ratio.

We've also shared examples with Ehud directly via email since the meetup. Between Ehud and Fej talking, it seems clear there is going to be some changes. One quote from Ehud: "We already have a fix for this but we need to test it. We plan to deploy it on a few servers and let you test it with us." But there was also an example I shared where, even though the road was well-established and not new, some segments had "something ... wrong in our historical speed data on one of the segments in the way." To which he also noted, "I'll let you know when we fix it (we're doing a global fix in case this issue effected other segments)."

Not that this means anything to learning routes. Waze has already stated multiple times in the last few months that they are working on bringing back actual, real, learned routes. I think the US meetup notes have it mentioned.

[yrrabsille]

Nice, thank you, that's good to hear.


Barry