I must admit right away - I am a baby wazer, just logged my 200th mile so far. However there are issues with this program that I can not stand and, unless I am doing it all wrong, this is not the GPS router that can be used in any shape or form.
The biggest issue I have is with the routing. Yes, it’s slow - veeeery slow. From what I understand it actually has to get online in order to route me to my destination. This does not work in cases where I blow my turn and need a quick bail-out. You can’t just stop in the middle of the traffic and wait until the program reroutes you via alternative street. But this is half the bad.
This week I used it for two locations: home to work and gym to home. My work commute is about 43 miles via very busy Bridgeport-Stamford corridor in CT. Major highways (I-95 and Meritt) are getting clogged early and stay busy pretty much the entire day. When I decided to find route using routing option to avoid highways, the Waze announced that there are none. Great! My Google navigator finds and provides three alternatives within 10 seconds and Waze after taking almost 40 seconds can not find a single path. So I decide to see how the routing via highways works. Waze sends me to I-95 even though I am only 1 mile away from Meritt entrance. When I decide to go via Meritt, it constantly tries to reroute me back to I-95 via local roads that would add huge delays to my commute. In one, especially hysterical example, Waze actually tries to take me off the Meritt, send on a 3 mile local detour and then get back on Meritt at the very same entrance!!! How can any program that pretends to be a GPS router do this is beyond me.
My gym to home commute is a sweet short 6 miles - all local roads (10 minutes tops from end to end). Waze calculates the route (again, slow) and announces that it would take me 28 minutes and 15 miles to get back home. No shorter alternatives, but Waze is happy to send me on a 40 mile detour if I don’t like the default 15 mile option. Lucky me, I know how to drive home. If this would be some location that I do not know well, I would be royally screwed by the program routing.
From what I read here, it is best to teach the program by turning the option ‘Learn your route’ and driving the preferred way couple of times. That would be fine I I were driving in the middle of nowhere and would need the program to understand the local roads better, but in my area there are plenty of Wazers and yet, the program is clueless at to how properly route. What is the point of GPS system if it’s only good when you already know all ins and outs in your area?
OK, this is a long post, so I try to describe the rest of the issues with the program quickly:
map zooming sucks. It blinds me if I go an inch over 40mph on local roads while the speed limit here is 45 on many of them and 35 on even more. Using other zooming options is not good either.
GPS location is very rough - often losing the signal and misjudging what road I am on. I would explain it by my phone if not for Google navigator that is spot on and quick on the very same phone.
Voice announce is not loud and muffled. I use US female voice but also tried Russian male - both suck if you try to hear the directions even with quiet music playing in the background. Same phone, Google navigator directions are both loud and clear. I like the voice synthesizer on Waze better as Google is to mechanical but what it is good for if you can’t hear it?
I have not played too much with map skins but the default night mode is awful - it shows your route in blue and guess what, the other streets are blue too, so good luck trying to understand your next turn.
I would appreciate any healthy criticism. How can I make this program better on my phone? What am I doing wrong?
Unfortunately this might not be the product for you then.
This product is like wikipedia, where the map data is not from big company that charges $100 bucks a year for updates. The maps are user generated and maintained (in some countries there are base maps, but even then they normally need some manual editing to get them in usable shape).
What is needed is for you or other users to take a look at the maps in their area, and help the project correct any issues with them. Once the map is in an okay shape, then waze needs data to do better routing. It needs to know the speeds, directionality, and allowed turns for the alternatives. Directionality and allowed turns can be worked out in the editor, or by route analysis by Waze seeing you drive them (sometimes it takes multiple passes to get this). Also route analysis gets the speed data. Without this data, all roads default to 10mph, and the unknown directionality, and turns adds more penalty to trying to use them.
Trust me, with good maps and data, waze can out perform some commercial GPSs. But I won’t lie, it takes work. You don’t need to put in as many hours as I’ve had, but if you put in a little effort for at least the roads on your normal travels, it will get better.
thanks for replying quickly. But I frankly don’t get your answer. I understand how Waze maps are produced but my issues should not happen in one of the most populous areas of Eastern United States with hundreds and hundreds of other wazers on the roads every day that I can see in my client whenever I start program. If I have to teach it even the most basic routing, what trust can I have if I am in the new area and request a routing. For all I know, the restaurant that would show on the Google local search as being 5 miles away would produce a 15 mile route on the Waze. I was able to detect the problem and disregard the suggested route on the road that I clearly know, but in the strange area I am pretty much at the mercy of programmed routing and if I can not trust it, what is the point in this program? I don’t need it for the roads that I travel every day. The social aspects of Waze are good and all but I sincerely hope they are not the focal point of the developers. Because if I want to play driving and socialize I would rather do it on my Xbox - cheaper on the gas and more Earth friendly to boot. What I appreciate in Waze (at least conceptually) is the idea that driver just 5-10 minutes in front of me can send an alert and the program (hopefully) would react and avoid me being stuck in the traffic. So far I have not see it. The routing that it tried to send me on my work commute was idiotic to say the least. How can you explain program saying that I need to exit highway go through dozens of traffic lights on congested roads only to come back to the very same entrance and reenter highway? These are not some roads on Mars - they are traveled many (many) times by all sort of people, including other Wazers. Yet the program, according to you, still would be unsure about directions and speed limits?
Hey Nets,
Although there are lots of Wazers around, I would guess they are all on I95 and not on the local roads. If everyone teaches waze about their local roads then you get to use their knowledge when you are in their neighborhood. I would suggest turning Waze on and just driving your normal routes for a bit until it can do them ok. You can then ask google for other routes and teach them to Waze also. It takes about a week to turn around new paths which is much better than any other nav system. Once Waze knows the normal way and has other choices too you will see it really kick in. I make frequent one hour trips to the same place and always use waze to get there and back. On several occasions it gave me a different route and I was glad as I saw the flashing lights on the main highway as I took the suggested exit. For faster results you can edit the map yourself but just driving with it turned on will help a lot. If you get stuck in traffic it will help the other wazers too. It will take some time but it will be worth it.
I’ll take your advice and will try to continue using waze. Question: if I turn on Waze will it still learn in the background or does it have to be a primary app. For example, can I turn on Waze then switch to Google (for directions that actually work and map view that for a change shows street names and not blind me). Would Waze still record information?
Oh, and there are plenty of Wazers on Meritt and local roads - in fact there are several groups for people who commute via Meritt every morning. This is the biggest mystery to me. All these people using Waze all this time and it is still clueless.
If you have an iOS device then you can run it in the background and it will learn and give alerts (if needed) and you will get points. I don’t know how the other phones work. I will warn you now if you drive the wrong way on a road it currently thinks is one-way it will act very strange until it thinks you are legal again. It should then fix the road to two-way on the next cycle (or so). Good luck.
First of all thank you for your feedback.
If you encounter any more “crazy” navigation issues, could you please report them to us at alpha@waze.com ?
You can do it through a screenshot of the app screen (if it’s obviously wrong) or a permalink to the map through the “Update map” section on the livemap in http://www.waze.com with a detail of “from where” and “to where” the navigation was problematic .
I’ve got a nice video I can send you of this happening, too. Eyal, this was happening in multiple locations simultaneously, so it was not map problems, and therefore the “map error” report method is not helpful.
We had some problems with one of our routing server in the US since Friday.
A fix was uploaded today (GMT +2) and from what we’ve seen the problem was solved.
Hopefully, the problem with the server would explain it then. I am still driving with Waze every day and I must admit, it’s either getting better or I just get adjusted to the idiosyncrasies. It still sends me on a detour near my house but at least not a wild one. I have also noticed that for some reason routing breaks down on some portions of the Meritt parkway. Like it thinks that certain small portions of Parkway just don’t exist. And it is not the same spots every time, so it should be something with routing rather then mapping. For all I know this may also explain the example I described in the first post when I was directed to exit the highway and reenter it 50 yards down the road after long detour.
I can also confirm that Waze is alive on Android phones in the background, so I can use it together with Google Maps.
The biggest problem for now is the dynamic map zooming which is seriously broken and jerkiness of the GPS marker. Google can detect properly when I decide to exit the highway and the exit ramp goes for a while parallel to the highway. Waze thinks that I am on the highway long after I left it and then gets disoriented on which road I am until good 30-40 seconds later.
Waze also runs in the background on winmo - I was very suprised to hear it does on IOS as it doesn’t generally permit two apps to run at once (unless one of them is iTunes)…
Yes this answered some questions for me being i came on here to find the reason it has been sending me out of the way every where i go… 95% of the places ive went so far have been wrong some by a little some by a lot… There are a lot of Waze users where i am (Staten Island, NY) and like i said i understand it has to learn it still is a issue as the other poster said when you need to go some where your not sure of… Granted it will take you there just will it take you 30 miles out of the way in the process… Im gonna keep trying it though we will have to see!
