Waze is an awesome app. When it sees a segment is closed, it simply finds the next fastest route around it. While this is usually awesome, it can be not so awesome when Waze starts sending tons of traffic through residential neighborhoods that are full of kids riding bikes and playing outside.
I’d like to propose a way for Waze to designate official detours when a segment gets closed.
Municipalities designate official detour routes for many reasons. Roads that are designed to handle more traffic. Roads that have higher speed limits. Roads that don’t go through residential areas. Roads that are safer for more and faster cars to be driving on. Waze doesn’t know these things and just choose the fastest route even if it goes against those above items. This might be faster but reduces safety and increase the change of accidents.
My initial thought on how to make this work is:
When a segment is closed in WME, there could be a box to designate an official detour segment. Then any time a route is calculated that would have used the closed segment, it could recalculate a route that would use the detour segment as a waypoint of sorts to force the route to go the way it was designed, or to find a different route that circumvents the closure all together.
See the attached image for some closures near where I live. The RED segment is or was closed recently. The GREEN arrows are the official detour that go down streets that are designed to hold more traffic and are not residential. The BLUE arrows are where Waze directs people which is 100% through residential area with lots of stop signs (that people now don’t stop for), tight turns, and kids. The PURPLE/PINK segment is what could be the Detour Segment. That way any routes that would normally use the RED segment would be forced to get recalculated to incorporate the PURPLE segment which would properly route traffic that way it was designed to go.
The alternative would be to not designate a detour segment but to designate ANTI detour segments and set segments that Waze would not use to route traffic. For that you could designate some of the segments near the blue arrows to tell Waze not to use those, but that might be trickier to figure out.
Anyway, after dealing with this firsthand all spring/summer long, something like this would go a long way towards making Waze safer for the people who live along the routes it decides to use.
There is a very, very long discussion on this very subject over here.
The long and the short of it is: public-owned roads are public - everyone can use them. We editors are not to disable legal routes. If you don’t want people routed over a public road, contact the locality responsible and have them change the ordinances regarding residential thru-streets.
I’m familiar with that other situation and this isn’t exactly the same. That situation is when traffic is bad and Waze is just searching for a better route to send people down. My suggestions is for a planned closure with specific detour outlined by the government officials that Waze doesn’t know about.
Sure, Waze can take the attitude of “We don’t care about your stinking detour” and route people the “Fastest” way regardless of where those routes go and how disruptive it might be to the residents. Or Waze could take the attitude of “There’s an official detour setup for a reason. Those officials probably have a valid reason for routing people in a certain way. We should honor that and route people along the designated detour.”
I’m just throwing out a possibility that would allow Waze to use designated detours when they exist. This doesn’t have anything to do with routing people based on traffic backups like in the other thread.
I’ve moved this thread from the Waze Map Editor general section to the WME Feature Requests sub-section.
There is a pinned post at the top of this section called [Guidelines] How to request and search for new features, please read it and follow the instructions there. Currently you’ve just open a discussion topic, you haven’t yet actually submitted your suggestion the proper way and staff will never see it here.
I do understand what you are saying, but ultimately, I do feel that it is going against kind of the purpose of the application which is to send you down the fastest route possible.
The question I have to ask is - is it faster to travel through the neighborhood or to take the detour?
That is the route that I would like to have Waze send me down.
Like I said, it’s more of a philosophy thing of Speed vs Safety.
If Waze takes the stance of screw safety and screw the number of vehicles certain roads are designed for because they want to shave 90 seconds off a drive, then yes, going through the subdivisions are faster depending on where you’re coming from and going to.
If Waze takes the stance of maybe not sending hundreds of cars down a street that normally only has a handful, and realizing that kids play and ride bikes in residential subdivisions and it’s not safe for it to send 50 times the traffic down some streets, then something like a detour system would be great and would make Waze look like an awesome app in the eyes of everyone.
Hopefully Waze never has to defend a lawsuit for a kid that gets killed because Waze sent 1000 cars down their street and the people were speeding because they don’t like driving through subdivisions filled with stop signs, and they didn’t look and ran someone over.
I agree with your philosophy, but not with your conclusion.
It’s the drivers that choose to practice unsafe driving. It’s not due to the existence of Waze or the way it works that this happens. With a 50x increase of responsible drivers, this situation would only be a big nuisance. And is waze responsible for 100% of the extra traffic?
Also, by implementing such a system (if technically possible) wouldn’t the accountability move towards the editors.
Isn’t it time for government officials to start realising that tools like Waze (and others) exist. And consequently implement detour plans that include better temporary measures to protect unfit detour roads. (But I guess they don’t read this forum too [emoji57])
I agree with wimvandierendonck to say that is Waze responsible for the ills of the traffic? It appears as though you feel it is Waze that is responsible for what the drivers are doing?
Waze isn’t going out of its way saying “You know, let’s send people down this way because we feel like it” - Waze is solely providing the otherwise fastest route from point A to point B given current traffic conditions. If it is faster, then that is the route that it is going to be offered. It [u][i]is irrelevant[/u][/i] that it is a freeway, a residential road, a major artery, or a paved road that goes through the middle of the country.
Waze isn’t taking a stance here saying “Oh, yeah, we love sending people down residential roads, we get a kick whenever that happens!”
Waze simply offers the fastest route. As winvandierendonck said, there are things that local government can do. Perhaps put in speed bumps to slow down traffic through that area. Perhaps have signs with police presence to prevent turns during certain times of the day (which then can be added into the map). Or maybe there’s something else that exists out there for them to do.
Honestly, this really does sound similar to every other situation. In this case, a road closure has caused traffic to be bad and Waze is just searching for a better route to send people down. Waze found that the next “best” (meaning fastest) route is through these roads. It just so happens that these roads are the type that they are, but it would do the same thing even if those roads were major arterials, freeways, or whatever.