Extremely disappointed in Waze

Map Editors Community General Topics
1

I have been using Waze for a couple of months. In that time I have had the program frequently crash, frequently give me directions that were totally absurd, not be able to find my destination, and on and on. I keep waiting for it to get better, but somehow that never seems to happen. Just today, I took a trip to a restaurant which I have made on Waze many times before, and it keeps trying to route me the long way around. I will be on a road that goes straight to my desination without a turn, and it will tell me to make a turn and then another turn so now I am driving a right triangle to my destination rather than a straight line. Now how dumb is that?

Tonight I came home from this restaurant which is about a 5 mile trip with only a few turns. Waze at one point, told me again to not go “straight” on the road that I was on which is the shortest and quickest way home, and tells me to get on an interstate, drive one exit south which is a few miles south, get off the interstate, and then drive in heavy traffic on an access road , about a mile north, to get to the place I would have been probably 8 minutes prior to this “scenic routing” that Waze dreamed up.

I recommended Waze to my daughter a few weeks ago, who works in downtown Atlanta to use on her new iPhone 4, and the first two times she used it, it got her lost downtown, and she was late for an appointment. Again it routed her around in circles. She quickly uninstalled it from her phone, which I can’t blame her for doing.

Now here is what I think Waze is good for. You know where you are going and how to get there, prior to even starting Waze. Waze gives you traffic warnings, police warnings, etc,. etc… and for that it is great. Now, if you are counting on Waze to direct you to where you have to be, especially if you have no idea how to get to your destination, it is like playing the lottery or gambling in Las Vegas, and Waze is the house, so you will lose. My opinion, this App is in the early Beta stage, and has a long, long way to go to be a reliable navigation app. The concept is good, but it can’t be relied on.

Now to the folks that are going to tell me to send reports in, etc…etc…, these errors and crashes happen far too frequently , and I already have a full time job…

2

What you are experiencing is unfortunately due to the infrastructure not being able to keep up with demand. And waze HQ has admitted that the original design that works in smaller scale in Israel, did not scale to the sizes they are currently running.

They are currently working on changing things to break dependency, and speed up the map refresh cycle, with the goal of this being done no earlier than July.

While the map updates take month or longer to be done, the learning part of waze does not work.

New directionality, turn restrictions, and possible speed (haven’t confirmed this one) are integrated into the map at the refresh times. So, if the maps updated every 2 to 3 days like in the early days, the system would learn and the repeated routing wrong ways would sort itself out. We would be only left with fixing the base map issues.

So, all I can say, is hopefully when HQ is done with the infrastructure changes, things will get better.

3

A couple of points:

  1. I’ve only been using Waze for two weeks, but I would never rely on it for directions at this stage. It’s a COMMUTER app. Commuters know where they are going, but want to have information about hazards, police, and traffic jams.

  2. It will take the effort of the community to turn Waze into a true navigation tool. And it will likely take years. If you’re expecting a FREE app from a start up company to immediately match or rival the pricey product that is the result of (likely) millions of hours of effort from companies such as Garmin, you might want to consider that this probably isn’t very realistic. I’d also say that I haven’t seen any marketing that leads me to believe any such claims are being made.

  3. I was confused about the misdirection and odd routes for the first couple of days, then I spent the time to understand how this thing works, and began to edit, edit, edit. I, too have a full time job, but I also believe that a cooperative effort will yield a great product which will benefit all of us. Not everyone has that same view, and I’m sorry that’s the case.

  4. Your rant, quite frankly, isn’t constructive criticism. It’s complaining. I’m certainly sorry that your daughter got lost. I’d suggest buying her a proven, reliable navigation system next time if you don’t want to risk being surprised. In fact, I’d suggest that for ANY of the free apps that provide services that you deem critical.

4

+1 very well put. I’d just like to add that Waze is community based and the catch 22 with it is if you just rant, it’ll never be fixed. Pick up a mouse and get editing. Read the wiki, familiarize yourself with the editor and the way it works and get stuck in. Even half hour a couple times a week can be the difference between crap routes and roads, and a pretty good system. I’ve seen it work here and it does but the maps need editors more than it needs drivers.

using Tapatalk

5

I can confirm that the average speed as shown by Cartouche_old is updated in between map updates.

Due to a long standing funky route, I overkilled and bridged 4 kilometers of one-way road to average all the historical speed data. What ended up happening, since the native directions were mixed, was that the resulting fully rejunctioned segments had NaN’s for speed in each direction. I checked them daily and they started to to collect averages again as displayed in Cartouche_old, this all happened between map updates.

6

+1

Totally agree. Quite often I read people complaining about the map quality, route quality, routes missing, etc. but instead of helping to fix and try to understand the system they quit.

waze clearly has advantages over company controlled maps in some areas but also has disadvantages in completeness and others. As with every navigation system You (as the user) have to learn how the system works and what the issues are. With waze at least You have a good chance to make changes happen! It’s all the wazers who help improve the system.

7

Hear hear, the clue is in the name ‘community based’

Nuff from me.

8

Unfortunately, the problems that I am experiencing have absolutely nothing to do with the maps or their quality. When you are routed many times on a direct route from point A to point B, and suddenly, you are routed from point A to C, and from C to point B, which is a longer route, and not the straight line route you had traveled many times , and the longer route is jammed with traffic on the dog leg, then the routing is broken. Last evening, Waze tried to turn me on a longer route, and the route was lit up red and showing the traffic at 5mph. The straight line route I was on, had almost no traffic and was going about 30 mph. If I had traveled the suggested route it would have added distance and time to my trip over the direct route. The same thing happened on the return trip home at a different place. Waze decided that traveling a straight line was not as good as getting on and off an interstate, adding a couple of miles to my trip home. No maps had changed, and the traffic was worse on the Waze route. So to blame it on a map problem, or that we users can fix this, I don’t think is realistic.

I went to the live map page this morning and under directions I put the route that I wanted to travel in, and Waze gave me 2 different routes, with the preferred route, that one that it tried to direct me on last night. It was 5.5 miles. The route I drove home, which is the route I have used for over 20 years in this area is 3.4 miles. Now other than a sightseeing trip, I can see no advantage to driving a route that is around 60% longer… :?

9

Just to be sure, Waze does not go by miles, but by time. If the map is correct, Waze thought the alternative was quicker.

10

This sounds to me like an example of the feature/bug where if a segment is too slow the routing server assumes the live data is wrong and uses historical or base data instead of the live data.

That would make for strange routes when the striaght line route is backed up some but not enough to trigger the failsafe while nearby routes do trigger the failsafe.

11

Check your settings in the app. Under “Navigation”, “Type”, “Shortest” or “Quickest”, which one is checked?

12

I just started really using Waze when I just got my new Waze compatible iPhone 4s. (My older iPhone 3g just wasn’t really compatible.) I run a plumbing and heating company in a semi-rural area. We’re always out on the road. Since it seems that approximately 99% of the roads and junctions in our county are already accurate, it doesn’t seem like asking too much to fix the remaining 1%, and worth the effort to get the program to work well in our county. Though If I lived in a big city like Atlanta, I’m sure that would seem to me to be a much more daunting task.

Looking forward to hopefully getting our small county in good shape.

Cheers,

Scott Perry

13

Quickest is checked. I am going to experiment with this…

14

Used to get crazy directions getting home. It was giving me 4 more miles to drive to get home. That’s when I thought
“oh, this sh_t is messed up! Who in the hell would use this crap?!?”
That was when waze launched. Instead of complaining about the problem, I started to look online to see “why” it was doing that. Turns out, one street was listed as one way, other was not listed to be able to turn right, and the other problem was that road was not listed.
I’ve met many cool people on here & always gets me motivated to edit & help the map in the Nashville, Tn area which I live.

15

I agree with others that bobsk8 makes some interesting points. Waze has great potential but simply doesn’t measure up as a navigation tool at this point. I love the community aspect of it and am only hoping I’m not making routing more difficult with the major changes I’ve made during the last few weeks; the Atlanta area is quite messy. One of the area managers has also made many changes during the last few weeks but none of our changes show up yet since the Live Map is over 5 weeks out of date.

As far as the marketing of the product is concerned, the following is extracted from the Android Apps Store description of Waze.

“When you download Waze, you not only get a free traffic & navigation app, but also …”

I suspect that most people download Waze because they are using a mobile device (e.g. iPhone) that does play well with Google Maps. They are not downloading Waze to be part of a community. I’m lucky, when I need navigation assistance, I use Google Maps. The rest of the time I use Waze because of the other features and because it’s fun.

16

Hey, I just wanted to interject! I’m an active (lonely) editor from Southeast Tennessee. Anyway, I’m always trying to find Tennessee editors that I can converse with, to say the least.

Be sure to check out our subforum and the Tennessee Wikipage in my sig. I’d appreciate any help in making the Wikipage more complete.

As for the topic, routing in my area has been horrible until this last update. And it’s getting better. I can see the results of my work. I’m getting alternative routes, even on long distance trips. It takes time, but some areas progress faster than others. Southeast Tennessee will be superb (in terms of map quality) for longer-distance travel :slight_smile:

It really depends on the area though. Bad maps means Waze can’t do a thing. But it’s awesome to see Waze working better and better after every map update.

17

Are you 100% sure that no segments, junctions, etc., have been changed along your route? I ask because since the last update, my route home from the places that I normally travel has been messed up … but it’s because of a problem with a road that I added (forgot to set one turn restriction where it intersected my main road home ::)).

The odd part is that in order to avoid going straight through that one restricted turn, it told me to violate a different turn restriction (a U-turn at a half-bowtie on an offramp to get back on the freeway) … then, when I refused to do that, it told me to violate another different turn restriction to get back on the freeway … when I didn’t do that, it told me to get on the freeway in the other direction, drive 4 miles to the last exit, then turn around and drive 8 miles (past the spot I was) to the next exit, then come back 2 miles to my house! After I ignored that, it gave me one more similar option, which I also rejected … and then I was past the restriction, and it gave me the proper route home. This has happened every time since the update; of course, I don’t think I found out and got the correction in until after March 7, so I’ll probably have to wait two more updates until I start getting the right route home. ::slight_smile:

18

I just downloaded Waze on an iPhone. Haven’t driven a foot with it. But I saw this thread and felt a little concern and confusion. How can users improve the routing, won’t that be in the algorithm and require programming?

19

I double checked the routing and the map seems correct. Now I am thinking that maybe Waze is trying to turn me away from roads that are normally congested, and send me on a longer but faster route, assuming this problem of a congested road. Now on the particular time that I was traveling this was not an issue, but maybe it is using routing to avoid roads that are “typically” congested.

20

At least it has the potential to work.

You should try Waze in Japan, where no matter how perfect a map we may generate it is NEVER going to be a navigation app because it doesn’t make allowances for an address system that doesn’t use street names and house numbers.