Why cannot I not have it find a destination? For example I ask it to find an address in North Carolina but it only returns address in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and Wisconsin.
I think we will need more of a hint. What phone, operating system, etc. are you using? If you put in “city, state” it works almost all the time. I have seen it get confused when that is also the name of some landmark (rivers mostly).
I had a post on this earlier today. If the street of address is not found via Bing, you likely won’t get a route with Waze even if the street is in the Waze maps.
What address in NC are you trying to route to? I’m the area manager for the Triangle area so I might be able to help you out. If it is around Charlotte, HavanaDay can likely help.
I have a Razr version 2.3.5. Running the lastest version of Waze
It can’t even find the town of Asheville. I’m not going to give the address obviously however if I just search for Asheville NC it doesn’t even find that. It will give me selected streets names Asheville in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
That being said I can’t get the app to run anymore. Driving home I got an incoming call and the app crashed. It would not force close as the icon was still displaying in the info bar even after selecting “force close”. It is showing as not running in Task Manager. The only way I can get it to actually close is to reboot my phone. Maybe I need to uninstall then re-install.
Waze can’t find Asheville, NC from my phone either. The livemap and WME find it just fine. I can’t imagine why trying to navigate to Asheville, NC won’t work.
App is working now. Uninstalled and re-installed. Force closed one time but I got it restarted.
It seems like it is keeping all of the search results to a regional area. I have my event radius set to all although I doubt that has anything to do with it.
Just for shits and giggles I searched Las Vegas Nevada and all I get is a bunch of results for Las Vegas Dr in various cities in Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois
I’m finding that the waze tab in the search results won’t return any result that is more than about 300 miles away. This likely doesn’t explain why you can’t find Asheville, but it does explain why I can’t.
It’s more than 300 miles for me. So how do you find destinations for long trips? Besides selecting it directly from the map which is kind of pain in the ass’ish.
If I search for say “Hilton, Asheville, NC” the Bing results return a few hotels in Asheville that waze will route me to. So it seems that you can search, find and route to POIs but not addresses over about 300 miles away.
Whats the point of a nav system if you can’t navigate to points of interest over 300 miles away? Seems kind of silly.
Waze is a daily commute and traffic jam avoidance app, not a general-purpose, drive me 3000 miles away app. It may start gaining some of those features, but right now that is not their aim.
As for driving to a POI 300 miles away, that works just fine. Put in the POI name, not an address. Addresses have been problematic for Waze recently, but POIs work just fine. I can get routes to POIs up to 750 miles away right now. Eventually, the route length limit will be even greater. The infrastructure needs to be beefed up to handle users requesting lots of really long routes as the computational time required for very long routes is exponentially more complex than driving across town or even across a state.
Waze is finding POIs for me to route to over 300 miles away (through the third party search providers). Waze is not finding address locations over 300 miles away for me.
If waze continues to save me a hour so a week in commuting time (which it likely does), I’m happy regardless of whether it can find an adress for me across the country. Not to say that finding address more than 300 miles away wouldn’t be nice as well.
Then why give 1000 points for driving 500 miles in a week? That’s not exactly ‘daily commute’ distance.
I just saw this app featured on Lifehacker and it was billed as a navigation app (yes not Waze’s problem) but this is obviously not what I was expecting. Seems like the idea has GREAT potential but it just seems to fall short.
Waze would like everyone in the world (ok, so their infrastructure actually would be crushed if this was the case) to run their application everywhere that they drive. This contributes data to the system the helps everyone using their application. They are trying to get you used to running Waze everytime you are in your car to get the bonus. Basically training you to use Waze every day (hence the Waze 2 days in a week, 3 days in a week, etc bonuses). Yes, maybe the 500 miles in one week bonus is a bit out of reach for most daily commuters.
If people only turn on Waze after they get stuck in a traffic jam (unfortunately this is common), they are not gathering the information they need to give us better navigation guidance.
The app has great potential as a commuting GPS application designed to find the fastest route in the current conditions, including traffic. It is really not designed for long route, trip planning.
Yes, it is unfair to compare Waze head to head with the other general GPS applications. It has it’s niche.
Waze as a general purpose long route trip planning/social networking app would be killer. I mean let’s face it, people know how to get to work everyday and don’t need a nav app to do it. They don’t want to mess with turning it on if they are just going to work. I would venture to guess that a vast majority of people do not live in areas where traffic is even that big of a concern. However if I am driving long distances in areas I am not familiar alerts such as traffic and construction would be a great benefit.
I think Waze has a great idea they are just missing the boat on their target audience (so to speak).
But this is exactly how Waze is positioned. Yes, we know you know how to get to work and back. But use us everyday and your data will help others with their commutes and on those occasions where your normal route is delayed, we will send you another way and get you to your destination faster.
I don’t know where you live, but traffic is a huge problem in nearly every major metropolitan area, Worldwide. If you really don’t have traffic, then fortunately you probably don’t need Waze.
Top traffic cities in the USA:
http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/
Loads of additional details:
+1
For example, I have 2 different routes to get home. On one of those routes, I have 3 different options to get to the same place. Based on what Waze knows about the traffic ahead, I could get any one of those different options. Since we have enough local Wazers in the Philadelphia area, I can usually trust it when it takes me off the normal path. I reaaaaaally don’t want to get on the PA Turnpike to get home if there’s a bad traffic jam as there are 8 miles between exits.
For the average commuter in a congested city, Waze can save you minutes a day, sometimes hours in a month or even a week. That’s not a vision, that’s the truth.
I’m not saying the local use is of no value. I just think it is limiting the value of a great idea.
I saw in another thread, or it could have been this one, that they find that a lot of people are only turning it on when they get in a traffic jam. That’s what I would expect. And that doesn’t happen very often for a large portion of the population.
There will be a social media driving app that is also a general purpose navigation app. It may be an app by Facebook - who knows. It will generate a lot of money for whoever implements it. Waze as it sits, is not it.
So if I asked you - ‘could you please run Waze every day on your commute, you will help others in your area that are using Waze by providing more data for all. And you might even say some time yourself’
Could you, would you?
If the answer is no, why? Simply because you don’t have a traffic issue where you live and it’s of no benefit to you?
If it really is of no benefit to you, then you have downloaded an application that you don’t want/need and should do with it what you do with other applications that you don’t want/need. Maybe Waze will continue to expand in it’s capabilities in the future and you can try it again some day.
Waze is constantly improving and adding features. Maybe one day it will be the do it all GPS application. But today it has a narrower focus.