Central Artery Tunnel

Map Editors Community United States Massachusetts
1

Is there a way to fix Waze’s understanding of the Central Artery Tunnel?

When I leave work late, I drive through the tunnel (heading south) on the way home. It’s almost always the case that when I exit the tunnel, my ETA at home is five minutes earlier than when I entered it (clearly Waze thinks that it will take five minutes longer to get through the tunnel than it actually does). This happened last night at about 7:15 PM.

The five-minutes-longer sometimes results in odd routing recommendations. When heading north, it’s not uncommon for Waze to recommend getting off the highway, taking local roads through the city, and then getting back on - I always ignore these recommendations and almost always find that there’s no traffic in the tunnel to warrant the recommendation.

If I’m leaving Cambridge and heading south, Waze again makes strange routing suggestions based upon the incorrect information about tunnel traffic. What can be done?

2

Shamelessly replying to my own topic in hopes of attracting some response from someone who knows what’s going on.

3

I hope you don’t mind me bumping this as well but for a different reason though. Currently, there have been several UR’s reporting that they are unable to use the directed route because the turns aren’t allowed. However, working and traveling in that particular area, I know that the reason for the UR’s is that Waze thinks they are on the highway but in reality, they are on the surface roads. Is there any way to rectify this?

4

No argument from me!

5

Short answer, alas, is no.

If you search this forum, you will see that this question has come up many times before. As harling has explained, since there is no GPS reception in the tunnels, there is no way for Waze to track any user’s position or speed while they are underground. The routing engine normally relies on such data to determine the projected speed of various routes.

Unless you can figure out a way to get radio signals from a satellite to penetrate through the tunnel ceilings, or get MassDOT to put a bunch of Wi-Fi beacons down there to provide both location data and Internet access, I don’t think there is any way Waze can improve in this area.

6

Thanks, Russ.

In cases like this one, Waze ought to be able to calculate the speed and time it takes to get through the tunnel by looking at how long it takes for vehicles to get from the entrance to the exit. This can’t be the only tunnel in the world with this kind of problem.

7

Can you point me to where harling explained this? I did search for similar complaints before posting and didn’t find anything.

Also, how does Waze get suggestions for new features? If this is a known and not currently soluble problem, there must be a feature that could fix it (since we know that tunnel-speed / tunnel-time are logically derivable).

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Don’t know much about suggestions except for a post in the Waze App forums.

9

for editors: I am going to start answering these questions with this answer. please make changes if you want something else in it or use it yourself if you like it.

There is a known problem in this location with the GPS not understanding the levels of of the roads you are driving and which one you are on. This also occurs when the GPS signal is lost inside of a tunnel. At this moment we have requested a fix from the devlopers but have not heard anything about them considering to fix it. We recommend being verbal in this thread to help us make our point about getting this fixed. https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=95780&hilit=93+boston We will close this report as we have a few marker reports containing the data we want to get fixed. Thanks for reporting!

“Becareful of the link shortening by the forum”

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Thanks, Dale. I’ve posted in the linked topic. Hard to understand why the development team wouldn’t fix this. Boston isn’t the only city with subterranean roadways.

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well i take someone has told them. discussing it in the MA forum isnt telling them about it.

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This tunnel issue is actually relatively unique to boston, and if you search for “tunnel” within the forums, there are only a few exceptions outside of Boston, at least within the united states. Reason being that although there frequently tunnels elsewhere, Boston seems unique that there are lots of exits require navigation instructions within the tunnel system itself.

Prior threads in vain include this one and this one and there’s even a wiki page about it.

My summary is that like many other issues (Route 9 medians, anybody…anybody?), the Waze developers have their list of things that have been requested, and this is on it. Like any other commercial entity, whether they decide to actually act on it is determined by how many customers are asking for it, which determines priority. If Boston is one of only 2 or 3 cities where this is an issue, it becomes a low priority and we are forced to keep grumbling that nothing gets fixed.