Over the last few months I have repeatedly reported New North Road in London N1 as closed long term for roadworks, only to repeatedly get sent down that road. Eventually after emailing support it finally got marked as closed for a few weeks, until recently when Waze has started sending me down that route again. On Monday I marked the road as closed for roadworks long term, on Tuesday it sent me down there again. Surely the algorithms can tell that no car has successfully exited the other end of that road in many months. What do I have to do to make my reports count for anything? I travel 10000 miles per year using Waze.
Welcome to the forums!
Please give us a permalink to work with. Then an advanced editor can put the closure in at the right spot on New North Road. Also a timeframe for the works is always handy as this information can sometimes be hard to come by.
How to make a Permalink (or watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYmU6UPCiZs)
When you add a road closure through the app, the closure only stays live for a matter of hours, perhaps longer if other users also report the closure close to when you add it. Then you have to re-add the closure. Submitting an application through the forums gets the closure onto the app as a permanent feature and also effects routing.
Hope this all makes sense, glad to have you aboard.
Ian
Based on the slightly ambiguous information on roadworks.org, plus your comments here, plus a couple of in-app closures visible in the map editor as of about 5 minutes ago, I’ve now applied a new long-term closure here through to late December.
The only available roadworks info here is, as noted above, a bit ambiguous - whilst there is reference to a road closure, the location of the marker used on the roadworks.org map to indicate the closure doesn’t make it immediately obvious which road is actually closed, and the basic description of the works being carried out don’t seem to tally with the road needing to be closed for the entire duration specified.
There have been countless examples where the information on roadworks.org will state that a road is closed between two widely seperated dates, when in reality those dates only mark the start and end of the associated traffic order required to enable the road to be closed, and where the closure itself only needs to be put in place for a few days at some point within that overall period. I suspect most/all of the editors who deal with road closure reports will have been burnt in the past by applying a long term closure based in good faith on the roadworks.org details, only to then find out a few days later from the barrage of resultant “this road isn’t closed, you idiots!” URs that, well, actually, the road isn’t closed for the full duration of the works period… So now I think many of us are justifiably wary of blindly accepting the closure details from roadworks.org, particularly for what seems like an inordinately lengthy closure relative to the described works, and will now only apply such closures when we’re able to corroborate the details via other means - such as a user telling us that the closure really is a long-term one, just as you’ve done here.
As for why Waze doesn’t automatically keep your in-app closure reports live for more than a few hours at a time… Remember that the only source of traffic flow data Waze gets is from its own users - unlike some other navigation tools, it doesn’t pull in data from third party sources such as Trafficmaster. So if a road is marked as closed in Waze, and Waze then routes its users around the closure, there’s a good chance that Waze will then receive little or no traffic flow data from its own users who’ve chosen to ignore the suggested routes and drive along what appears to be a closed road. The very thing which makes Waze so good - routing users away from traffic buildups, accidents, closures etc. - is also one of its great weaknesses - it can take a while for Waze to learn when the road conditions have returned to normal, causing it to continue to re-route unecessarily for longer than might be ideal.
Which is why closures reported via the app have to expire automatically after a relatively short period of time unless they’re either extended by other Wazers reporting the same closure in-app, or by one of us editing the end date/time within the map editor. Otherwise there’s a real risk that the closure would hang around on the map far longer than is appropriate, because unlike sections of road that Waze thinks are slow moving but where it may still end up routing people along either because they’ve asked for the shortest route, or because it still is the quickest route for them - and where it’ll therefore still be able to gather some data about the current traffic flow conditions - a road closure isn’t something Waze will ever attempt to route though no matter how much shorter it’d make the route.