I hate single track roads, yet Waze loves them

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

I currently commute from Hemel Hempstead to Stokenchurch. It’s quite a long drive, but I’m moving closer soon so it’s fine. :slight_smile:

I could just take the M25>M40 both ways and have it done in 40 minutes, but the M25 doesn’t work properly in the morning so I have to go another way around (A41 to Tring, then A and B roads to Stokenchurch. There is a single instance of a single track road right at the end of the trip, but I often ignore Waze and go round depending on the weather). Coming home the M25 just about functions as a road, at least in the direction I’m travelling, so I can just do M40>M25 with no problems.

As one of the alternatives to these two routes, Waze always suggests some other crazy routes going down millions of country lanes, but I never ever want to do that, because they’re country lanes. Simply put: I never want to go on single track roads with passing places unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even through I drive a clapped out old Celica, I do not want to pretend I’m driving a rally stage. Waze, however, seems determined to take me on them, thinking they’re an easy and fun drive around the USA and not what they really are: a great way to practise squeezing between a 4x4 BMWs and a hedge, uphill, or nearly slamming into chav kids going 50mph round a blind corner whilst I’m doing 20. I once had some utter idiot in a 4x4 BMW not reverse far enough back to his passing place (he made an effort, I guess?) which meant I had to skirt around him. My car was literally at 45 degrees to the horizon to get round this guy. (I have a broken nearside coil spring – I was dreading the drop back down to level territory and the inevitable snap. Thankfully it didn’t)

I understand that Waze is an American app, and so it’s rating go from pristine tree-lined streets to “4x4 fun dirt roads” with no inbetween, as that’s all they have over there, but can we not request some kind of inbetween category? I’d really like for these crappy roads to be marked as “single track roads” and also for an option to never go down them unless required.

Perhaps at this UK annual user conference that’s coming up you could take any visiting yanks for a drive down a “primary street” country lane and see how much they like it?

As an example route of these hellish drives: the other day, there was a problem on the M25 at the M40 junction point. Some accident causing lots of standstill traffic? Waze kindly routed around the problem. I don’t know if the accident happened before I set off at ~5:15, and therefore was going on this route the entire time, or if Waze redirected me whilst I was driving on the M40, but had I taken a look at the map before setting off I would have “noped” right out of it and just taken the opposite route to my morning one (go north on some B- and A-roads and back to the A41 by Tring). But I didn’t know what was happened until it was too late. I even tried to abort the mission mid way through, but Waze offered me no sane ways back to civilization, that I could see, so I had to continue on with the country-lane madness.

I don’t know how to link to a route, so I’ll just link to snippets. Note how many of these roads are marked as Primary Streets or normal Streets with 60mph speed limit. Granted, that’s the lawful truth of those roads as they’re national speed limit, but they’re definitely unsafe to drive at those speeds? Plus, a lot of them are unsuitable for goods vehicles and clearly say so with signs, yet they’re still “primary streets” in Waze.

The google streetview pictures are a bit misleading in some cases, as they were all taken in autumn/winter, and so they don’t show the true horror these roads represent in July, when they are all pretty much surrounded by tall, full, scrapey hedges. I could upload some dashcam footage if you want :wink:

  • M40 at Stokenchurch

  • A355 (N)

  • A40

  • Potkiln Ln

  • Jordans Ln

  • Twitchell’s Ln

  • Through Chalfont St Giles

  • Across the A413 on the B4442

  • Down more of the B4442

  • Turn of the B4442 onto Roughwood Ln (Which is unnamed segment in the editor?)

  • Pass Little Chalfont via Lodge Ln

  • More Lodge Ln to cross the A404. At this point, whilst waiting to cross the busy A404, I was frantically mashing “find route” to try and get back onto the M25… Instead I think all I succeeded in doing was making Waze take me through Belsize>Chipperfield>Kings Langley rather than Hogpits Bottom>Bovingdon>Hemel. I imagine it was the same sort of ride no matter which of those two routes I took.

  • So because of that Frantic mashing I go right on Latimer Rd

  • Up Chenies Hill

  • Through Belsize

  • Up Dunny Ln into Chipperfield.

  • And on past Chipperfield into the back-end of Kings Langley

edit: Sorry, some of the links work, but some don’t! When I open them up, they take me to the right place on the map but some don’t select the road in question. If I highlight the road and select perma-link, Waze gives me the same URL…

2

A few points:

Waze is Israeli, not American.

Some people, me included, do enjoy country lanes. Depending on where you live you may not even have any choice but to drive on them (a lot of the time they are my only option to get some places)

Presumably the reason Waze decided to route you away from the traffic and onto country roads was because it would have saved you time. This is the primary purpose of Waze - to save you time and get out out of traffic jams. AIthough I and many others use it as their primary navigation app, this is not what it was intended to be used for initially (though, granted, it has catered more for this purpose in recent years)

I used to live in Chesham and used Latimer Road regularly - it is not a hellish country road and is a two lane single carriageway with plenty of space for two cars to pass - it used to be better before Bucks CC removed the centre white line, but it is still a good road and serves far better than the A404 to get from Chesham to Chorleywood.

I honestly think that if you don’t like the way Waze sends you, your best option is to use an alternative app, like Google Maps or TomTom. You’ll find yourself sitting in traffic more often but you won’t be sent weird routes!

3

I’ll try to give you some general answers and explanation.

First of all, Waze is not an American app in any way whatsoever. It originates in Israel (where nearly everyone uses it) and is used around the world. It’s true that some US cities have the highest densities of users, but the app and editor community is not dominated by the US in any way. What may give this impression is the US-centric nature of the default language. “Freeway”, “Highway”, “Alternate”, “Parking Lot” and others are all US English type terms. However this is, quite simply, because people in Israel (and for that matter most other countries around the world) are more exposed to US television than UK television and that’s what guides the style of English they learn. Many years ago, I was in Norway for a few days. Most of the people I met there spoke good English - and all with distinct American accents!

Next, why did some of your links not work? The reason is fairly simple - it catches many people out at first and it isn’t your fault. As you pan the map around selecting segments, you can cover a large area and zoom out to show them all. As you move the editor keeps a cache of where you have been looking, including all those segments. When you zoom out, that cache keeps the segments selected - but at low zoom, only higher segment types are selectable. When another editor opens your permalink (or you do after closing the editor), none of the segments are selected because segments can’t be selected at the low zoom in your permalink. And if the permalink included cached segments that weren’t visible on-screen, they won’t be in the cache when the permalink is re-opened.

Now, on to “primary streets”. The segment types Freeway, Major Highway, Minor Highway, Primary Street and Street are not really intended to describe the construction or size of the road at all. They are intended to describe the function of the road - what it’s use is intended to be for. Those 5 segment types describe a hierarchy of preference for routing. At the beginning or end of a route, any segment type will be considered. For the bulk of the route higher segment types are preferred and, the longer the route, the more preferred the higher types are. That is also adjusted by the amount of Waze users seen on segments. A primary street that carries a lot of users at a reasonable speed will be more preferred than one that is deserted or slow.

We are extremely fortunate in the UK to have a good road classification system provided by the authorities that accurately reflects the intended functions of the road system:

  • Freeway, obviously is Motorway and reflects a special class of high-speed road with limited access and special rules
  • Major Highway is the Primary Route Network. Briefly, the Government has a list of several hundred major population centres and decrees that they must all be connected to the PRN. Motorways and Trunk Roads (maintained by the Highways Agency) make up some of this network. The rest is the responsibility of Local Authorities
  • Minor Highway is other A roads. Not part of the PRN - but nevertheless classed as major routes
  • Primary Street - I’ll cover below
  • Street - everything else.

Primary Street is the level it would be nice to perhaps have 2 levels. But we don’t - and I doubt we’ll get one. Remember, because Waze is global, not American, it has to satisfy conditions in countries all over the world. If they tried to keep everyone happy, there would be 100 different levels and we’d never know which one to use.

We use primary street for 2 types of road. The first, as you can probably guess is B-roads. The other type is roads which are still considered suitable for routing from one place to another. There is some degree of subjectivity about this, but the simplest reference we use is the Ordnance Survey maps used to guide drivers. Here is an extract from part of your drive:
OSOpenData.png
The roads marked in yellow at that zoom level are what we would normally map as primary street. These are roads that the OS maps are highlighting to regular drivers as roads they can use for routing. You will almost always find that these road have signposts at the junctions pointing to nearby towns/villages because the authority who put up the signs is also recommending them for routing.

This is not an absolute guide for primaries - that’s why we rely on Area Managers who know the road. Some areas have too much marked in yellow by the OS - parts of Lincolnshire for example. In other areas, not marking in enough primary roads will lead to any available segment being used - and that can be even worse if there are better choices.

At the moment, for work, I frequently visit the South Coast from London. Returning at 6-7pm, the M25 is, as you’d expect, frequently jammed up. Waze also takes me along some narrow country lanes. Yes, they took some getting used to - but one of the reasons is the amount of traffic already using them. And the time saved by doing this can be up to half an hour of a two hour drive. It’s here - and the auto(4) lock demonstrates it’s in the top few percent of the most Waze-used roads in the country.

Consider this: if you follow Waze up a country lane and encounter another 40 cars on the same road, the chances are high that not one of them is using Waze: in London, approximately 0.2% of the population use Waze. So that means that Waze has just found you a route that 40 other people already know about and think is worth using. And remember, having the road marked as primary only partially increase the likelihood it will be used. A bigger factor may well be simply that lots of people are using the road.

Anyway, I’ve burbled on far too long. I didn’t mean to :oops: , but I felt your detailed post deserved a detailed reply and I got carried away. If you want to post back with specific sections that you feel should not be primary (no off-screen segments or zoom <4 :wink: ), I can have a look for you, but we do need to preserve a sensible routing priority.

4

If you would like to link a route, you can route it out using the Livemap

https://www.waze.com/livemap

Enter your starting and ending locations

Then a window will pop up - at the bottom it will say “Share Routes”

This will cause another window to pop up which you can then copy and paste to share your route.

5

Well I’m glad you like country lanes. It helps me greatly to know that. And I even bolded in my original post:

which clearly points out that I’m aware that their existence is necessary. But just because they’re sometimes necessary that doesn’t meant I want to route down them when going cross-county and spend an hour on them.

I use Waze to get out of traffic jams. That’s why I have it on even when doing the extremely straight forward drive of M40>M25. I’m thankful for Waze for re-routing me, even in this case. All as I said in my original post.

But I don’t think the country lanes save you time when you’re stuck behind a tractor or something, and vastly increase the risk of the drive. And I don’t think this is the kind of thing Waze seems to take into account

Latimer road wasn’t a problem. It’s the subsequent turn off onto Chenies Hill that’s a problem. (Bonus points: Press the ‘down arrow’ on your keyboard and watch as the google van has to trundle down the lane after a tractor). As a local I would expect you to know this and have experience with such routes, yet instead you’re being intellectually dishonest in an attempt to discredit my claims as being nonsense.

Perhaps I’ve inadvertently insulted your love of country roads? :slight_smile:

“Shut up or bugger off, there’ll be no changes to Waze ever”. What a wonderful message from a map area manager. A real brand ambassador.

Thanks for the reply, and mainly for at least reading my post :slight_smile:

Thanks for the explanation of the links. I suspected it might be something like that, given that I had to zoom in so far to select them in the first place.

I’m sure one extra subdivision couldn’t hurt :wink: It’s only for waffer thin roads.

Before posting I did look up on the Waze wiki about the UK road classifications in use, and noted, as you’ve said, that B roads = Primary streets and that editors should refer to the OS maps’ yellow roads. I didn’t have a physical map of this area, so I went on
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/osmaps/ and it didn’t show me any of the colours I expected. What did surprise me though is that a lot of these “primary streets” and yellow roads on OS maps aren’t even B-roads. They’re just minor roads.

For my reference, where did you get that online image from, so I can look at these maps in future?

A very interesting point. Many people do use these roads, and I guess that’s why I want to avoid them :wink: i.e. Some of them are not really designed for the amount and type of traffic that uses them, and I remember when my partner had a speed awareness course they told her some statistics about most road deaths being on country roads, usually with blind corners. (A quick google can’t directly back this up, as things like e.g. this, only talk about built up vs non-built up)

Thanks for the considered reply :wink:

I don’t want to go around suggesting what should be primary/non-primary, as I’m not really a Waze map editor and don’t really know about this stuff. I’ll leave that to you guys. (If anything, I’d suggest lowering the speed limits to ‘realistic’ levels, even if they don’t match the lawful status of those roads, but I don’t know how that works with your guys map editing policies)

What I’m mainly after, and I know that you can’t directly provide this for me, is for some extra indicator in the map editor that a road is ‘single-track with passing places’, or some other way to indicate to Waze to weight these roads a bit less in it’s routing choices, as they’re a different sort of beast than a normal suburban “street”.

Has anyone from the UK community requested that Waze add an extra road class, or a new “flag” for these things? I’m sure many other countries in the world have similar road types and could benefit from marking them out.

Thanks,

6

I’m not really one for reading or writing long posts, so here’s a quick tuppence:

Chenies Hill is currently marked as an ordinary Street, not Primary Street.

Here’s the route from Amersham to Kings Langley, and Waze does really like taking that route along Chenies Hill as it’s both shorter and quicker than any alternative.

The only option we have as map editors to force Waze to avoid this kind of road is mark it as a Dirt Track. However, this isn’t satisfactory as we really do like the map to match reality rather than the preference of drivers. Other drivers may well complain that they don’t get routed down this short-cut.

On the other hand, this particular case might warrant it…

7

I notice that the NSL/30 boundary is not in the correct place at the southern entrance to Chenie Hill. I don’t know if it would make any differences but it might!

8

Nope, speed limits don’t affect routing, unless there’s no historical data.

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9

Corrected! But as TImbones said, it won’t affect routing.

I’m afraid there really isn’t any way of telling Waze to avoid country lanes.

But it will have a tendency to avoid them for two reasons. Firstly, they tend to be slower.

Secondly, they tend to be less predictable. The Waze router doesn’t just automatically pick the route which is faster on average, it also considers the spread of times, and prefers a more predictable route. So if some people Wazers along, but others get stuck behind a tractor, that will penalise a route.

But ultimately, the router knows about times, not the width of the road, and if this lane is genuinely the quickest route, Waze “should” direct people along it.

If not many Wazers are using it, you can always skew the data by driving deliberately slowly along it. :evil:

And of course, you do retain control of the steering wheel. :slight_smile:

Ian

10

I was going to suggest that too! :o

Is this a similar to the use of the forward viewport? :o :o

11

We haven’t - and I wouldn’t bother seeing how unlikely it is to ever be approved. Bear in mind that, however many “levels” of routing priority we have, it’s going to be a fairly arbitrary division that is never going to be a good fit for all countries. A balance has to be struck between having a system that’s too simplistic to reflect reality and too complex to be implemented. And, of course, the current system is already in place. If a new type was introduced with no other change than it’s routing priority, we might be happy - but imaging 50% of the world’s editors who have no use for it trying to work out what to do with it!

Also, an extra routing priority probably wouldn’t help in this case. Segment type is only part of the routing equation. The other is real-time traffic. Since this is near London, there is a simple fact to bear in mind: at peak times, the road system is full to capacity. This means that not only are the main roads full of traffic, so are the minor roads and the streets and the country lanes. The country lane might seem slow, but you got routed there because everywhere else was even worse and this is the best of some bad choices.

What you really want is not an extra routing priority, but a flag for existing roads so you can then tick “avoid” in the client. Remember the road to Gairloch - there are A-roads and B-roads that are single track, so a new segment type to avoid wouldn’t help. We could ask for this - but the reality is that it would be a waste of time. We (most of the world) have been asking Waze for a better solution for dirt roads/unpaved roads/4x4 roads for years. They are finally moving to having a flag as well as a segment type, but even then I get the impression that they really don’t understand what editors are really after. Admission: neither to I, but then the UK doesn’t have a lot of unpaved major routes. :slight_smile:

There is a ray of hope for you. Waze are always talking about having the app be more responsive to individual users. For years the app said “Waze will learn your favourite routes” which was always a misleading lie. It learns your favourite destinations, but always generates the best route to get there dynamically. Well Waze are working on making that more user-specific. Is there a particular road you always take? Maybe routing will favour that road for you. Do you dislike difficult right turns? As for when the app will learn stuff like this - well the much-derided HQ answer is generally “soon”. :lol:

12

Not really a lie, more a misleading truth. Waze started without much road speed information. And it did, and still does, learn road speeds by tracking Wazers (at least in areas with a phone signal). So it is true to say that Waze does build up speed data along your favourite routes, and at your favourite times of day.

What it won’t do (at least not yet, see previous post) is associate that data with you personally. So while it may have more information about your favourite routes, and may possibly prefer routes that it has lots of data about, it won’t factor into it’s routing calculation the fact that this information has come from you rather than somebody else. So it won’t pick one route from A to B for you and a different one for somebody else.

Ian

13

I use this road regularly, along with many others in the area and have never really had a problem. The parallel road is mapped as a primary route and is a bit wider but this road is generally better. If you look up and down the road streetview will show quite a bit of traffic which reflects its popularity.

The bottom section may look a bit rough in places but it is far better in reality, maybe it’s been resurfaced and had the hedges trimmed. My general rule is if I can get up the road in the wife’s horsebox at reasonable speed without scratching the sides or bumping through too many potholes then it deserves to be mapped.

14

Have to say for what its worth agree totally with the OP ,travel all over the country in sales, other day down to an area between Bath and Bristol ,20 minutes of these single lane hedgerows with passing areas , nervous tension hell.Thing is it was a nice summer day ,what about in the evening november rain??? Nightmare. Asked my client the best way back as cant go through that again ,it was basically just a straight road back. Do realise its un resolvable and in its way Waze is better than Tom Tom Hardware in so many ways ,but it loves these lanes more than Garmin and thats saying something good Luck all,Pete

15

Can be quite bad down here in the west country.

Very common.

Easier at night as you can see headlights.

16

In my very personal opinion if HQ would implement the set speed limit as the maximum recorded and then look at changing the routing algorithm so that a percentage lower than set maximum is used to calculate routes. So a single track road which is probably 60 but has an average recorded of about 40 would be penalised harder than a 40 with an average of 40.

I’m a bit sleep deprived so that might be a bit odd sounding, I shall attempt to clarify tomorrow

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