Sometime within the past week or so, there seems to have been a change in house number resolution. I haven’t seen any documentation on it (if I’ve missed something please point me!). Assuming it’s for real, it’s a very positive change.
When there is no confirmed HN in WME (and the majority of HNs in WME in the US are not confirmed), and the user manually enters an address into the navigation box in Waze, Waze routes to the nearest point (on a drivable road) to the Google Pin for the address.
Where I edit in Chicago, Waze has for years routed residential addresses into alleys behind the house, rather than to the front. Confirming the HN fixes the problem, but with about a million HNs in the city of Chicago alone, most of them with alleys, we still have a lot (more than half) that aren’t confirmed. In the city and several suburbs, virtually every unconfirmed HN has a Google pin that was closer to the alley behind.
Starting roughly a week ago, the behavior changed, and Waze started routing addresses with unconfirmed HNs to the street side. I don’t know if it’s 100%, but so far I have checked a dozen or so, all of which would have been alley routings in the past, and they are all now routing to the street.
It appears that Google Maps has moved their pins. They used to be at the center of mass of the lot (usually the same place as an unconfirmed Waze HN from basemap). The center of the lot is closer to the centerline of the alley than the centerline of the street (due to setback), and that caused the alley routings. Now, at least in Chicago, the Google Maps pins are closer to the street. At least, a whole lot of them seem to have been moved.
I should note that we still get alley routings, but now they are from cached locations that weren’t cleared, or from third-party handoffs where Waze only gets the GPS coordinates, not the actual address (Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, and calendar appointments may still have issues). In the past week I haven’t had any alley routings that I was able to reproduce on my own device, which in my experience points to one of these exceptions. In the past, I typically worked 2-3 URs per day where the issue was NOT one of these exceptions (i.e. I could reproduce the alley routing, and fix it by confirming the HN). Those seem to be gone.
Anybody know anything more about this?