Now I don’t know anything about the APIs available to the developers, but accelerometer and gyro capabilities are perfect for tunnels where the Waze application currently has no idea what’s going on.
But I guess a timing feature, like most current car-gps kits currently have, and a road-setting for tunnels would be a start. Waze losing track of where you are as soon as you enter a tunnel is annoying.
Do Android and Windows Mobile too while you’re at it, no need to discriminate. And while you’re at it, we have compasses too :D.
Seriously, google for waze+uservoice and vote for ideas there. Also try not to limit your vision of your ideal waze to one platform (not that it’s a bad platform).
There is source code available. Use it!
I suppose this is a good place to ask for using the altitude also. When Waze tells me to turn right in the middle of a bridge, presumably as a “short-cut” to the road below, I can’t help but think there must be an automatic way to correct this. Waze on.
That’s a valid point actually. I keep forgetting Waze isn’t a iOS only application. Nevertheless, WM and Android devices will all be packing gyros in the forseeable future and until then we can all put the accelerometers and compasses to good use.
In any case, making tunnels navigable is a prerequisite and i just voted for it here:
http://waze.uservoice.com/forums/59223-client-how-can-we-improve-waze-on-your-phone-/suggestions/757024-make-tunnels-navigable?ref=title
Levels in the map editor are used for this. The bridge should be set to level +1 and the road under it could be set to level -1.
There is also a number of threads on this already in the “Map” section of the forum.
This isn’t due to any logic about altitude. This is due to the seeding from the government tiger map data. It was imported as a flat surface, so the waze servers by themselves have no clue what is an over/under pass and what is an intersection.
Either someone needs to manually remove the intersection node in the middle of the over/under pass, or wait till the server has seen enough routes using the on/off ramps to prefer them. (option number 1 is the best in my opinion. But is time consuming. guess where all my points came from 
)
Next time anyone of you is in a serious tunnel, try the compass app of your iPhone. Then, please report your findings. ;^) but even if it worked, directional information is not helpful in a straight tunnel. (I know of one corkscrewshaped tunnel!)
The accelerometer is way too inaccurate, unless you brake/accellerate very hard it will hardly notice. If you more or less roll to a stop, the accelerometer will let you roll forever.
Not sure about the gyro, though, but will not be very useful in a straight tunnel, as there will be nothing to report anyway.
As for height above sealevel: GPS receivers report it, given enough satelites in view, but typically with less precision than length and width. Apart from the problem that you do not have any satelites in view ib a tunnel to begin with, it would not help if the tunnel is level.
But rejoice, other gps’s have mastered it 10 years ago, with simple algorithms, at least for 90% of the tunnels at least, so there still is hope for waze.
And how often do you have to take a turn INSIDE a tunnel? Most tunnels have 1 entry and 1 exit, so the main problem there is that in longer tunnels Waze does not collect the points, thus leaving the road unroutable until edited.
In the rare case a tunnel DOES have 2 exits, wouldn’t a special announcement help? Something like:
“You are about to enter a tunnel. In the tunnel, 800 meters from here, keep right.”
Use that!
As for height. Waze could collect data on average road height and add that to the map (like automatic geometry adjustments based on gps tracks). Thus it could figure out which roads cannot be connected under any circumstance.
For tunnels we just need a new road type “tunnel”. Waze would know these probably don’t have GPS and just use entry/exit times (on junctions) to calculate avg speed on this segment. With that avg speed it can show your car moving in the tunnel, factoring in your speed while entering it. This way waze can guesstimate your position in the tunnel (It’s the way other GPS units do it). Integrated GPS units sometimes get speed/kms driven info from the car’s CAN network and use that for a better estimate. The only way i see waze do that is having some kind of bluetooth dongle which reads CAN data and feeds it to your phone, way too far out at this moment for waze (I know a company who make these CAN interfaces).
jaimevisser is right - we need a tunnel-road-type as a minimum, and keep the logic simple. Special announcements could be triggered by entering a tunnel-road-segment, as would estimated speed. If you DO run into a trafficjam inside a tunnel, Waze will not notice it by reduced speed between GPS-fixes but by absense of GPS-fixes after enough time has passed to reach the other end.
Presto, next problem.
Oh, and I remember having read somewhere, long time ago, that Waze does indeed collect height along with the other data, in order to enhance the maps with heightdata. But not to decide if a roadjunction is really a bridge - as I said, GPS is inaccurate in the vertical dimension, and you would have to “see” a difference of maybe 4 - 5 meters to distinguish a bridge from an underpass. Ultimate goal would then be to create a route with the lowest fuel consumption (most interesting for trucks, if they can avoid to climb!)
+1 for that idea. It should be one of the easy things to implement since most of the needed functionality is already in place, e.g. average speed per segment.
Moved the topic to uservoice with libel cut/paste from this thread, continue on here and VOTE
Could be the fact that I am using Tapatalk on the road, but uservoice says ‘oops, cannot find that page’ (or something along that line)
forget that… It’s working again
+3 votes!