Doesn’t look like the Waze app is doing a passing job on avoiding closed roads.
Google Maps and King Count maps are reporting road closures (flooding), but not Waze.
My Waze friends are very frustrated right now.
This happens a lot: Road is closed, but not reported as closed, and that traffic congestion looks great…because there’s no cars. I would think there would be some sort of smart algorithm that would detect something highly usual if a main metro road doesn’t have cars on it.
Hi, you’re right, Waze isn’t always super effective with closed roads, but there’s nothing automatic about it in Washington.
Before I go on, however, I am going to dispute you straight up front, that Google has these closures. I don’t see any of the closures reported by King County in GMaps, either in the web or via the app.
It helps to first understand how closures in Waze work. They can be added via the app, though that is not very effective long term. They can be added through automated processes when municipal, county and state agencies partner with Waze, though so far no Washington entities (that I am aware of) have taken up offers from us to set that up, though we are certainly interested. And lastly, they can be entered manually by editors, but doing so requires an editor to be made aware of the closure, have time to put the closure in (we all have real lives, too), and most importantly know how long to set it for or have a reliable method of being informed when the road gets reopened.
This link you sent is super helpful, and I could enter these closures, but I don’t know for how long to set them. It’s just as bad to have a road closed in Waze that is actually open, then an not having a closure at all. And I’ll be honest, since we all have real lives, I can’t guarantee that any of us are going to commit to clicking reload on these links every few hours to keep updating it.
Now, all that said, when we find a helpful person willing to monitor that for us - and maybe you are one of those people, someone willing to let us know via Discord when changes occur, we are absolutely more than happy to add and update closures. If you were willing to do that for us, it would be enormously appreciated and we will do our best to keep those closures up to date.
And back to Waze vs GMaps - you might be interested in knowing that since Google owns Waze, there is some crossover between the apps. When Waze shows a closed road, GMaps has a process to also close it on their end when the segments match up. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it tries. So if you want GMaps closures to happen, it’s advisable to get them done through Waze.
Please reply to this thread - or email me at wazeswwa@gmail.com - if you are willing to monitor the King County closures map and let us know when changes occur. In the meantime, I will add these closures, but I’m going to set them to expire in a week.
Also, to follow up - When I went to put in these closures, I found several of them had in fact already been entered by another editor. Note that we don’t always close every segment indicated closed by sources like the County. Where they might show an entire stretch of roadway closed for a mile or more, we often only close the minimum required to prevent anyone from getting routed through the closure, without closing sections that are necessary to reach local destinations within the closure boundary.
Usually Waze shows flooded/closed roads - but not today! King County Washington is experiencing major flooding and only google maps is correctly identifying the many closed roads and nightmare traffic because of them. Didn’t Google buy Waze? Can’t you ask them for help with this :?: :?: :?:
Here is a nice link for you to use for washington state road issues https://www.wsdot.com/traffic/trafficalerts/
Hi there, Washington State Manager here. I’m usually on top of these things but I had to fly out of town for personal reasons. I have all of the King County and WSDOT closures set as of 0530 today.