I’m curious if anyone using waze has changed their driving habits as a direct result of directions given by waze.?
For myself, I always took a specific route between my wife’s work, and home whenever I went to pick her up. I had always felt that traveling a direct route to the freeway was faster (Roughly 20 miles). I had to travel 4 miles west of the eventual direction to get to that freeway, but I thought it was faster because I wouldn’t have to deal with traffic signals, and stop and go traffic. It sure felt like I was getting home faster. Turns out that Waze had me travel a more direct path even though it was a heavily traveled street with many signals (Roughly 16 Miles). I resisted this at first, but Waze kept insisting. So finally I decided to test this out by using a stop watch and traveling both routes. The route Waze sent me was only 1 minute shorter, but shorter in distance. Enough to possibly be a factor in cost of gasoline consumed vs. the two routes after several trips.
I havent really tried it yet. I usually go home the same way. I’ve only gone home other directions to get some road munching in. I’ll have to look into it and see if there is a faster way home sometime.
Whilst I had a pretty good idea what the shortest way for me to get to work was (due to the UK’s infamous “one-way-systems” in town centres there’s often not much choice, there are a few slightly different ways to drive them.
Having Waze is a little like having someone time all the possible different ways to drive, recording each route and letting you know. I’ve never been nerdy enough to do that myself, but I do like knowing that the way I’m now going is one minute shorter than all the others.
I’ve had the same situation. I used to follow the freeway till I was close to home. However, following waze’s directions actually got me home quicker, even though it felt longer due to the traffic.
Shorter is shorter, and quicker is quicker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is cheaper. It can be. It might be. But it might not. You typically use up the majority of fuel during acceleration. This is why city milage is worse than highway milage. Waze will definitely tell you the faster way in terms of time spent, but it might not be the cheaper way in terms of money spent on fuel. I think I remember looking at an iPhone app that used the accelerometers to track a trip and tell you which one likely used more fuel. Or something like that, not sure actually. At any rate, time is money, too.
Went to visit some friends last weekend. Followed the Waze directions to get to their house since I hadn’t been there in quite some time and wasn’t quite sure how to get there. The directions were correct and the route there was 61.13 km. On the way home, I used Waze again. This time it took me a different route that was 46.7 km… considerably shorter. I found that rather interesting. I would have thought for sure that it would have routed me the same way going back.
Could be more than one reason for that. First being there are commonly routing mistakes near me, even though the map is correct, so unfortunately the same may hold true for you in your area. They’re still trying to work bugs out in their routing algorithms. Turn restrictions not correctly set in the map as a portion of one of the trips and consequently it would route you strangely compared to what you can actually drive, which could be corrected by editing the map. Average speeds drastically different in one of the directions, perhaps simply by low Waze usage on any street involved, which could be corrected by more trips/drivers simply using Waze over time. And, of course, you could have been routed around traffic during the longer trip out there, which at that time may well have been the faster route, and perhaps at a different time it would have routed you along the mirror of the trip home.
This is why you see a message every time you request a route about it possibly not being optimal yet. It’s possible that all streets/turns involved in your trip have been correctly set and travelled enough times to have good average speeds, and it’s possible they haven’t yet. But as Waze gets used more and more, and by more and more people, the data it uses to make decisions will get better and better and its performance will get better and better. It seems to slip a lot of peoples’ minds that Waze will not route you like a dumb GPS unit will. It won’t simply route you by the shortest route, regardless of anything else. If everything is working properly, and it has enough data to work with, it will route you by the most optimal route at that given moment. If you use it to get to and from work, Monday to Friday, every single day of every week of the year, 52 weeks * 5 workdays = 260 days, 260 trips, it is entirely possible that you might not drive the same route twice. Why? Because it could route you around slow traffic to keep your trip shorter/quicker. And slow traffic can occur anywhere. And its goal is to optimize your trip according to current conditions. So why on earth is it telling you to turn left here when you know you should go straight? Probably because if you go straight you’ll run into traffic that’ll make your trip shorter.
Waze can see more than you. You should trust Waze, even when you think it is wrong about what will be faster. In the short term, it may not be faster. Probably mainly due to a lack of good data for average speeds on all segments. But as Waze users drive on more and more segments it has more data to work with, giving it more data to use, better average speeds, more accurate turn restriction data, making it better in the long term. And that short term where it isn’t very accurate or useful probably won’t be very long. Once I had a good portion of my area mapped it didn’t take long for it to stop changing its mind every day or two about routes and start routing me along the same optimal route every time, barring traffic. There definitely was a period where it would take me all sorts of ways to any given destination, since it didn’t have very good average speeds yet. But that didn’t last long. I trusted it and followed it several times no matter where I was going. Once I knew I had driven a given route maybe three times I would ignore it and take my own maybe three times, and another maybe three times, and then it would start picking and choosing better on its own. When it’s green, it’s not really, really useful. But once it has a ton of good data for average speeds it starts getting really good.
Could be that one of the roads one the way back home is incorrectly marked as a 1-way and was therefore not used when routing you to your friend’s house.
In hind sight… as mentioned, there is probably a road marked incorrectly as a one-way. It definitely was not because of traffic information as there are very few people using Waze in my area. When out driving, I might see one or two people within a 50 km radius… a month. But in the end, Waze did get me to my destination! Funny… my wife was sitting in the seat beside me and kept telling me that we were going the wrong way. If I had followed her directions we would have been lost! Haha.
She took it very well. She kept pointing over to the right saying we have to go “that way” and Waze was telling me to turn left. I told her to pull out her own iPhone and check Google maps to verify if Waze was taking us the right way. She pulled out her own iPhone and quietly stopped telling me to head to the right. :lol: That was the end of it.
That said, we have experienced some weird routing with Waze where it will send me north on a street to an intersection where it tells me to make a u-turn and go right back the way I came. And just last week, the client map showed the purple direction line as going straight (and it looked correct) but the voice kept randomly telling me to turn at various points (contrary to the routing line on the screen). So I suppose I can’t blame her for doubting the all mighty Waze! :lol:
I’ve done the same route for, literally, years, commuting to work. And every morning, there’s a 20 minute snarl-up of traffic. Yesterday, Waze suggested a new route. I never thought it would be quicker, but figured at least the scenery would be different. Wow! What a result! It shaved 15 minutes (75%!) off of my normal stuck-in-traffic delay, taking just five minutes on a route I’d never ever have considered taking instead of the normal 20. It was only a half-mile detour, off of the main roads, but was superb!
I rarely commute straight from home to work because i have to drop my son off at daycare. The few times i did, Waze would tell me to go a way I just knew couldn’t be quicker, but it was, and Google Maps confirmed it. It’s my preferred route now when i’m not munching on the way home. Recently, twice in one day, I noticed that Waze had me turn the block before a stop light where i was going to make a right turn. Rather than one right turn at the light, i made a right turn the block before, a left and a right back on to the road i would have turned on to from the light. Wonder if there is a new “long redlight” algorithm.
Takes some time to get those average speeds that it uses to determine routes. Waze will always suck until it gets enough of that data. After it has that, it is awesome.
