Hi,
Please can someone update the right turn northbound onto the A34 from the A560 Gatley Road to a difficult turn.
https://www.waze.com/editor?env=row&lon=-2.22356&lat=53.39114&s=87137557&zoom=5&segments=189134532
I can spend 10 minutes or more in the morning waiting to get through these lights as there is no filter.
I am only a Level 1, so cannot make this change.
Thanks,
Chris
Whilst this may be a difficult turn to make in reality, this isn’t a difficult turn as far as Waze’s implementation of them is concerned - see https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=261780.
Any delays in being able to make a right turn here due to the traffic conditions ought to be handled by Waze’s ongoing monitoring of traffic and route timings and taken into account when suggesting the use of this turn. When Waze directs you to take this turn in the mornings, does the ETA not reflect the typical time spent waiting to make the turn?
Every time I join the traffic in rush hour my ETA will increase by at least 10 minutes while waiting to make the turn. I believe the problem here is because the traffic to my left that carries straight on makes the system think there is no delay.
I thought that if the turn was changed into a difficult one the navigation would be less likely to send people right through the junction and thus decrease the time spend in the queue.
Waze knows which exit a user takes out of a junction, and so for junctions like this where a straight-on lane is fairly free-flowing whilst a turn lane gets backed up, it should be able to build up a reasonably good idea that any route through the junction which requires use of that turn will be slower than any route which goes straight on.
However, as Waze only learns about traffic flow from users who have the app running as they drive, it may be the case that there aren’t enough users making this right turn either because it’s not a particularly popular route for Waze to need to generate, or because enough users are already aware of it being a slow turn for them to ignore Waze when it’s suggested to them, such that Waze hasn’t yet been able to gather enough traffic flow data for this turn to have learned just how bad it is… The fact that your ETA doesn’t already take the delays here into account before you’ve joined the queue does tend to suggest this, in which case the data you’re now providing to Waze by sitting in the queue will be helping it to eventually make better decisions here.
Unfortunately there’s no way we can tell Waze that a given route is slower moving than it currently thinks it is, it’s only by having sufficient users drive the route to supply traffic flow data that things get more accurate. In areas with plenty of users following plenty of different routes, this works incredibly well - I use Waze in and around London, and it’s often scarily accurate when predicting route timings even through junctions that I know get regularly backed up at certain times of the day.
Marking the turn as difficult will certainly discourage Waze from suggesting it except to users who’ve chosen to allow use of difficult turns. The problem then would be that most users don’t select this option, and so with even fewer users making the turn, Waze will almost certainly never figure out how bad it is at those times of the day.
It might help to consider being stuck in the queue there and thus contributing traffic flow data about that right turn as your way of paying for Waze - sometimes you’re the one stuck in a jam providing data that Waze can then use to help route other users away from it, other times you’ll be routed around traffic you might not even know was there because some other users have drawn the short straw that time and provided the data that helped Waze to help you.