Does Waze consider smaller roads into it's routing?

[RodNav]

On the "support" page, enter "penalty" and look at the automatic answer. All is clear for me to understand that smaller roads are taken into trip calculation.

Sure, but any routing penalty for lower classes of roads should be less than a 2 hour traffic delay!

Copied this from the automatic answer:

Code: Select all

Long Distances:
0-15 km - All road types are allows for routing.
15-20 km - All road types except Streets.
20-30 km - All road types except Streets and Primary streets.
30-200 km - Only Minor, Major, and Freeways.
more than 200 km - only Freeways.


Well, that makes it clear that on any route longer than 15km, Streets are ignored in routing. And anything more than 30km only highway and freeway types will be used. I think waze needs to seriously rethink this. In fact, if there is sufficient historical speed data, why even consider the road type? If a Street route is faster than a Freeway route, then it is faster.
Also, why a penalty for junctions? If waze knows the time taken to transit two junctioned segments, it shouldn't add another 5 seconds for the junction. Near my house I cross 3 very close junctions in about 9-10 seconds, but I guess waze must calculate that it is actually 25 seconds. (10 + (3x5))

[Antmannz]

Copied this from the automatic answer:

Code: Select all

Long Distances:
0-15 km - All road types are allows for routing.
15-20 km - All road types except Streets.
20-30 km - All road types except Streets and Primary streets.
30-200 km - Only Minor, Major, and Freeways.
more than 200 km - only Freeways.


That's nuts. Most commutes would be longer than 20km; and here in Auckland the motorways (freeways) are the state highways (major, minor) thereby negating any sort of usefulness whatsoever.

[RallyChris]

Take this list with a grain of salt.

Another thread mentioned this list, but real world examples showed that they were not hard fast rules.

[WeeeZer14]

if there is sufficient historical speed data, why even consider the road type?

Scalability is why. If I am trying to find a route from NYC to LA across all of the US, it would take infinite resources to check every possible route. So we reduce the calculations required and only examine a subset of road types.

If roads have the correct type applied, this works well. But one single street segment in the middle of what should be a freeway will indeed cause problems. That is a map data issue though, and not a routing algorithm issue.

[bgodette]

But one single street segment in the middle of what should be a freeway will indeed cause problems.

That's not the case either. The system appears to have different pruning strengths depending on how far A->B is in a straight line. All road types appear to be considered but at ever decreasing run lengths the farther A->B is. There's also a prune based on the ratio of straight line distance vs traveled distance, this was the problem Jenncard originally had for Boulder->Winter Park that has since been adjusted at least twice to some larger number.

From that other thread you saw, my long non-freeway route example tipping point happens to be right around 330km in a straight line.

In any case, as you mentioned, it's best to have your roads Typed correctly for best results. It matters, but not as much as that penalties list would lead you to believe.

[xteejx]

As far as I can tell there are no problems that would cause this. It appears to be a routing algorithm error.

Sent from my GT-I9100P using Tapatalk 2

[kotatsu]

I think the error is rather general and not just restricted to the examples I gave in my initial posts. Tonight for example it was, yet again, total chaos on the M6 with mile after mile of virtually stationary traffic. Fool that I am I stuck with Waze, hoping it would offer me an alternative. (of which there were several) It never did.

I kept trying, right up until I was at the last possible escape route from traffic hell, but this is the only route Waze offered - https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?saddr=Be ... =prev&z=12 That route was of course, terrible, and added a good 20 minutes to my journey.

It could have taken me this way instead - https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?saddr=Be ... via=1&z=13

The purpose of Waze is surely to avoid traffic, and yet in my experience Waze is really rather terrible at avoiding traffic. It knows the traffic is there, the roads are marked red and coated with 'heavy traffic' and 'complete standstill' tags, but it's routing is so faulty it's incapable of doing anything about it.

It would be nice if it could be fixed, as Co-Pilot simply does a better job at what's important right now. In every other way - interface, speed, design etc - Co-Pilot is an unmitigated disaster, but it gets me home quicker.

[reflon]

Basically it should take the freeways and such to begin with but when it detects heavy traffic or anything that will slow you down, it should start looking to all the roads nearby. Now I'm not sure if that's how they have it setup and it's just doing that cuz of a bug or something or they have it setup a different way but to me that seems like the most logical way.

[PhantomSoul]

I don't agree with using streets or other lower-grade roads for long trips at all. Fact of the matter is that 99% of the time it's always better to sit out regular congestion on the freeway or other large road than it is to try and detour it on surface streets.

I've tried this many times myself, largely because I easily get annoyed if I have to drive on any road at speeds significantly lower than the speed limit, and I've found unless there is some kind of acute incident - like an accident - that closes the entire road - in which case there would be a forced detour anyway - trying to detour highway traffic on surface roads has hardly ever gotten me to my destination faster, and in most cases it actually got me there later. Even for things like accidents, the nearby surface roads are going to be totally gridlocked with like half the other cars from the highway trying to do the same thing - and surface roads are just plain not designed to handle that kind of traffic.

The only way to really effectively be able to expect to cross urban areas at highway speed limits is during off-peak times, when traffic is light. Perhaps a more useful feature might be a delay estimate, in say minutes, of the traffic ahead on the route. A lot of the state highway signs that tell you how long it takes to go a certain distance are very useful in this regard and it might be nice to have a more-scaleable version of it in the navigation

[AlanOfTheBerg]

Waze tracks road congestion/speed in 10-minute intervals for every day of the week. With enough Wazer density and data made available by Wazers being on all the roads at some point in the past contributing to the data, Waze should be able to make the best calculation in most every circumstance. I think having ALL the data necessary is a good sized chunk of the problem in Waze knowing when it is OK to route off the main roadways.