Next update on NA tiles?

by **wpegues** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 2:24 pm

I think a lot of people in the northern Virginia area would really benefit from the next tile update. The last time they were updated, an inexperienced editor had redesignated a segment of the main commuting artery (Interstate 66 east bound) as a 'parking lot road'. After Waze starting routing me onto local streets to avoid the 'parking lot road' I found the problem and changed it last week. So its ready to go. But all the new users, and there are tons of them popping up on this route, are likely getting confused.

Waze is really great for commuting in this area, responding to rerouting due to traffic very well. Its saved me numerous times.

Thanks!

by **WeeeZer14** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 2:39 pm

I am in the DC area this week and from what I have heard and experienced first hand, I-66 IS a parking lot most of the time! :lol:

by **kentsmith9** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 3:18 pm

You can check the page status.waze.com for the latest news.

by **slevit1** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 9:16 pm

Unfortunately, the status page is not up to date either! 6 days ago, they said they were hoping to give an update in 2-3 days! Of course, they did update that status page today, but only to tell people that they're turning off comments, with no mention of when we might expect a NA update.

Since they've turned off comments, I thought I'd take a second here to vent. The status page says they're reading the forums, so maybe they'd care to comment?

The fact that it's been over a month since the last update is really unacceptable. It's even worse that we have no good explanation as to why it's been this long (only a vague reference to two processes at once) and there's been basically no update on the progress. Maybe Waze and I have very different priorities, but it seems that they've got their priorities completely backwards.

When Apple comes out with their free mapping solution, I think Waze is going to be in a lot of trouble, particularly if they don't change things very quickly. Waze is a pretty great app with a lot of potential, which is why I've spent way too many hours editing the maps. I also love seeing that I'm actually improving the maps, helping others, and having a little fun while I'm at it. I think it's obvious that Waze's best asset is the social and community features. However, they lately seem to be completely oblivious to the importance of the social aspect, and more importantly, the important of their editors!

Waze can advertise all they want about the quality of their maps vs other mapping solutions. Maybe in well populated areas with a lot of editors, they are more accurate than competitors. However, in areas that are poorly populated and a large amount of the maps are base maps, they can be pretty atrocious. I made a couple of hundred edits yesterday to rural areas where the intersections were all wrong, the roads had no directionality (or more often, it was wrong), roads and developments were missing, etc. If the roads are not continually updated by the editors, then there are going to be serious issues with the reliability of the maps. And if Waze does not do something very soon about the time it takes to update the maps, they're going to lose their editors! The fun of editing is seeing your changes in the map, not waiting over a month for the changes to take effect! Also not fun is the constant update requests when the maps are not updated in the client, but the problem has long since been fixed. And to compound the issue further, the default message sent after update requests are fixed is completely off with the time frame of when updates will appear!

Why don't you get it, Waze? Your best asset is your community, and you're making a lot of your community very unhappy! You're already not the only free game in town and in a few short months, you're going to have a free competitor that will be extraordinarily difficult to compete with, and with some features that Waze does not offer, and will likely be unable to offer anytime soon. What they will not have is the ability to update a road when it's closed temporarily for construction, to add a road the day it opens, immediately fix an incorrect street name, etc. That's what separates Waze, but at the moment, Waze doesn't offer that either. They will be able to do crowd sourced traffic and since it's going to be integrated into the OS of nearly everyone with an iPhone, it may very well be more accurate than Waze.

Clearly, your servers are incapable of handling the number of users you currently have. You're very secretive about what exactly the problem is, but something is a very big problem. So please, stop focusing on attracting new users when you can't handle the ones you have! Don't release a major update that you expect to attract tons more users before you're sure the servers take the strain! Stop adding poorly implemented features (like gas prices) until you've got the current features working perfectly! When you have the updates down to less than a week to going live and you have the capacity to make it even better up and ready to go, then maybe talk about adding more users.

Reading through the comments (now disabled) on the status page, it's pretty obvious that you have a lot of seasoned editors who are not very happy with both the lack of tile updates for over a month, and even more so with the complete lack of transparency and updates as to when we may expect new tiles. If you lose your editors and lose the community that makes Waze great, you lose the only real advantage that Waze has. If I were you, I'd be very afraid when iOS 6 is released, unless things change drastically very soon.

by **par129** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:44 am

Why is WAZE totally ignoring North America? They updated the rest of the world except NA. They will not even provide any kind of ETA status for us.

I think something else is going on within Waze. Also believe the reason that they banned comments from http://status.waze.com/ and then removed all the comments was because of the many customers complaining that it made them look bad (ignoring their NA customers).

PLEASE TALK TO US WAZE AND GIVE US SOME STATUS!

by **jasonh300** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:51 am

They probably shut off comments because people kept asking the same questions. It's been in the status page at least once, and discussed in a dozen different threads in the forums. Waze is running a process on the NA server that involves infrastructure, or something not tiles related. Until that is complete, the tiles can't update. There's a lot more to Waze than tiles updates, and with the hope of new upcoming features that will come when this background process completes, we have to just sit back and wait.

by **bgodette** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 2:03 am

par129 wrote:They updated the rest of the world except NA.

Olympics.

by **gettingthere** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 4:56 am

slevit1 - many of us share your frustration. We don't understand why Waze operates this way, but they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

by **wpegues** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:01 am

Gee, I just asked a basic question -grin!

I am not really miffed, I know there can be good reasons for things. But I wanted to point out the kinds of things that have been backing up can also be important. Right now, if you are coming from the west, I66 does not exist for Waze, of if you force it to go there, it wants to leave for neighborhood streets. I am sure there are many other fixes in. Actually, there are several hundred corrections pending just from me for this last edit. Most are intersections discovered with incorrect turns allowed or disallowed. That can really hurt the new person too. And I am not a super active editor, I spend a couple hours when I can, not multiple hours every day. The things I try to correct are not just neatening the alignment of roads, but fixing bad functionality. I am sure that is true for many out there.

For the visitor bemoaning what has been heard of I66 that is true - most of the time. But NOT during rush hour inside the beltway. From about 30 minutes after it becomes HOV2 only in the morning until HOV2 ends in the morning, its great. From Reston, down the toll road on its HOV2 lane, a slowdown at 495 to about 30 mph for less than 5 minutes its mostly 65-70 mph all the way to the Roosevelt Bridge. Its 35 minutes door to door from home in Reston to the office which is 4 blocks north of the White House. Any other route, any other day including weekends, its not less than 45 minutes at best and often an hour. Same reversing at the end of the day.

by **daknife** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:12 am

Unfortunately you're the victim of about the worst case scenario, somebody messed up a major route just prior to the last update and now we're at a month and counting on the next update that will fix the problem. Similarly somebody messed up the Verrazano Narrows Bridge again just before the last update, the fix was quick and simple but now we are over a month since the last update with no projected time for the next update.

To be honest though we were spoiled in May and June with weekly updates, just last Feb we went about a month between updates.