Hello there. I’ve been using Waze for years, and it’s been top-notch in calculating routes, estimating drive time, and warning for hazards.
With that said, I regret to say that every update since 2023 has been making things progressively worse. Last year, it routed me down an unmaintained rutted out mud road for 10 miles or so. The speed limit on the road was 55, but driving faster than 8 MPH would have been catastrophic. I’m not sure what “shortcut” it was attempting, but it was anything but.
The last update was the worst one. Leaving my own neighborhood, it now tries to make me drive down the block and turn left across 4 very busy lanes of traffic in order to “avoid” a red light. It’s borderlined unusable now in unfamiliar areas. My wife and I took a road trip to the beach yesterday (7 hours from home), and it put us at and address 20 minutes from where we needed to go. Yes, I had the address entered properly. During the trip, it attempted to route us through 1-lane road construction on an interstate where the traffic was at a standstill - rather than just let us drive through town to get to where we were going.
I realize that Waze is a labor of love, and it’s all volunteers working on it. I do appreciate it, but as a software engineer myself, I try to remind folks to stick to the KISS principle - which means to keep things simple, and don’t fix what’s not broken. We need to undo some of the things that were done lately, and consider making more advanced tuning options for people.
When life gets a bit less busy, I intend on looking into what goes into the development of this, and see if maybe I can help pitch in to make things better. I believe in Waze and want it to return to beating the pants off of Garmin, Google Maps, and others. As of right now.. it’s not there anymore.