As a option for gas stations waze should add ethanol free fuel as an option.
If that were a universal option it would make sense, but as many areas don’t get that choice it’s just adding another field for data that would only confuse people in areas where all fuel may contain ethanol.
But for the people where it is available or have a preference to ethanol free. The option makes sense. Like where I live we don’t have stoplight cameras but I can still select it. I think it’s a legit suggestion since for my gas station needs I usually will pull up a different app to find an ethanol free station.
But again the issue is it’s one more set of prices to add, when many areas don’t even have the option. But if they add that, then why not have them add CNG and LPG prices, oh and some stations near where I live sell farm diesel (it’s not legal to use in street vehicles but it’s cheaper). How many more prices do we add? Oh and this one station sell near where I live sells four grades of gasoline not the usual 3. The point is, just about everywhere you can find Diesel, and up to three grades of gasoline. Some areas have additional fuel types and grades available that others don’t. Waze can’t try to cover all the possible fuel types. The station with four grades of gasoline (all of which may contain up to 10% ethanol or so the stickers say), two grades of diesel and a CNG refuling hookup makes seven fuel prices I could report at that station. Where does it end? Keep it simple, Diesel and the standard three grades of gasoline (being sure to list them with the generic word descriptions rather than octane ratings, as regular where I live is 85 due to the altitude rather than the 87 you see at lower elevations.
As to the camera example, we currently have two camera types to deal with, red-light and speed. If the authorities come up with more camera types to keep track of, (which I doubt) that too may become to burdensome to retain in the app.
Just leaves people hunting other places to fill the gap. If you are in a new city and need to find a CNG place it would be extremely beneficial to have that listed. I agree it only complicates things but sometimes having the option is nice. Maybe implement a basic and advanced mode. Yes I know I just further complicated things for developers but would solve the extras being shown for the end user.
It’s probably not reasonable for Waze to add additional fuel types and options. Too damn confusing and impacts very few people. The average Wazer can’t even properly identify where there is a red light camera. So they certainly won’t have any clue about ethanol content.
Since small engines such as ATV’s, lawn mowers etc don’t do well with ethanol. Just the location and not necessarily the price would be nice to have
There is the option of providing the ability to rearrange the gas price screen a little. Here’s one possibility…
List the 3 main gas prices plus diesel as it is now. Also include the option to Add additional types of gas to the station in a format similar to how adding alternate road names words. Use a drop down that has all of the different fuel types and the user picks the fuel type and enters the price. After being added, anyone else looking at the station will see the price listed in that new list. Any stations without any extra types won’t show them, so this would only affect stations that actually have other types of gas. For that matter, the three main items + diesel could all be displayed in a list format like that. That would allow stations who don’t sell three types of gas plus diesel to only list the ones that they sell. I know most have at least 3 + diesel, but not all do. Having the extras simply not show up helps keep the screen clean.
Another benefit of a list format is that you can display last updated dates for each individual price. If I’m at a gas station that has diesel in only certain pumps and it’s not displayed on one of those large billboard type of signs, I’ll update the prices at my pump and will not bother trying to figure out the diesel price. That doesn’t mean that after I update the other prices to today’s date that the diesel price is current as of the same date. I’ll also update prices on stations who don’t have automatic updates while I drive past them by using the signs they have. Those signs don’t always display all prices, so I may only be updating Regular and Diesel for some stations. These aren’t stations I actually use so I won’t be stopping to get the prices. If I didn’t update them at least this much, then they’d almost never be updated (no one was updating them very often before I started). Or, if I update a price on an imported station that isn’t importing all prices, we don’t want that price to be marked as current every day when the import happens. By having separate dates, you easily see when the price is updated for the type of gas you’re looking for. It helps you to better know when the data is valid.
If something like this were done, you should have the option your preferences to check off any of the new fuel types to use when checking gas prices like what we have with the main gas types now.
EDIT: Another thing we can do with these is to include electric charging stations as part of the gas station setup. Just treat that as another kind of fuel and it will make it easy to find them using the system that is already in place.