This one affects me as I drive from Mill Bay, BC to Sidney, BC every day for work. It seems that often the BB/MB ferry route gets marked as a highway and then Waze tries to route me over it. It’s not a commute-viable option so I never take it, nor would I recommend it for such in most cases. I’m not being allowed to edit it, and all I would like to see is it marked correctly as a ferry route and not a ‘highway’ that you can just drive on.
Further and possibly complicating this, it is marked as a toll route yet even with ‘Avoid Toll Roads’ switched on I am still navigated to this route (Android 6.0 on a Nexus 5).
The trouble with marking it as “Ferry”, it becomes completely unroutable.
Since it is part of the highway system, it will remain marked as such.
However, there is a project underway to get the crossing times fixed - this should help routing. Please contact Kayos_on_the_Road, as he’s handling that for BC.
The BB/MB ferry currently calculates as taking a little over 5 minutes where the actual crossing time is 25 minutes. I am working to have the crossing times forced, but we can’t do anything about the potential wait times for getting onto the ferry. Therefore, although the additional time may help reduce the routing issues, there is no guarantee that they will be completely fixed.
I just checked travel time from Cobble Hill to North Saanich (about the same commute you’re talking about) and the server gives me about 30 minutes via the ferry, and 50 minutes via the Malahat, so the extra 20 minutes would bring the two routes to about the same time. I’ll post here again once the ferry route times are fixed and see if your commute options have improved.
You can also try running in Avoid Toll Roads mode. This will still let you off the island as there is no alternative, but should prevent routing over the Mill Bay ferry.
Wooker has said that doesn’t work which may be due to the routing engine ignoring the avoid tolls because the time appears so much quicker than the Malahat. With the updated and correct crossing times the Avoid Toll Routes should be more successful. If there are still issues, I have another idea to make the ferry even less attractive for the routing engine.