Your app is sending people down back roads in the Santa Cruz Mountains that are not built for such high traffic volumes or heavy vehicles. Parts of the road are down to one lane and are heavily damaged from all of the traffic.
Route is Hwy 17 to Vine Hill Road South to Mountain View to Laurel Glen to Soquel San Jose Road.
The other issue is that there is no cell coverage on these roads, so people lose direction, get confused and slow traffic down as they are trying to figure it out.
The final issue is commercial vehicles are using this route from your app and they are not supposed to use these roads as they are too narrow to accommodate large trucks or trailers.
Moved to the California forum
I’m not sure who the “you” is in this. Most of us in the forums have no relationship with Waze the company - we’re either users of the app (“Wazers”) or map editors for the most part. Regarding the roads in the Santa Cruz mountains, I tend to agree that they are not high standard roads, and they’ve been severely compromised by storm damage (not by all the heavy traffic). Waze may add a few vehicles a day to some of these roads, but not huge numbers. These roads simply aren’t the quickest route for most destinations.
I have driven this route (not because I needed to, but because an Update Request complained about people being taken this way). I found it to be a fairly comfortable route, but I’m sure my wife would disagree. But it was far shorter (and quicker) than the alternative via SR-17, SR-1 and Soquel San Jose Rd. It would be nice if Waze had a way to mark narrow twisty roads and an option to allow people to choose to avoid them. But it doesn’t - and as far as I know, neither does any other navigation app. I added a short Private Road segment to discourage the route, but as I told the reporter at the time, this isn’t really Kosher and another editor could have “fixed” my fix at any time. I don’t like to sabotage the map like this - many Wazers are happy with twisty roads and just want to get there faster. I know I hate Waze’s tendency to favor freeway routes at the expense of time - I often ignore Waze’s attempt to route me on a 4-mile freeway route to a destination 2 miles away via streets.
True of much of the SC Mountains. But Waze generally will store the map and the route and continue giving directions.
Drivers of these vehicles are professionals and should know better. Since Waze currently has no way to know what type of vehicle you are driving, it can’t take vehicle characteristics into account. A useful feature to add at some point, I agree.
Another volunteer responding. Volunteer bwawsc covered pretty much everything in the post above. I’d just add that the enthusiastic popular embrace of navigation apps has caught everyone a bit off guard, from drivers to roadway authorities to the app developers themselves.
Solutions are taking time. Such solutions can include (a) authorities placing new restrictions on various turns and roads; (b) trucking companies requiring their drivers to stay on main roads; and (c) making the strengths and weaknesses of the various apps clearer to their users.
One thing that isn’t a solution, sorry to say, is for us volunteers to “hack” our local Waze map to prevent legal, public routes. It’s tempting, but such hacks always have undesired side-effects. We often end up robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I would agree with the other editors that have posted (bwawsc & dwarflord). If a route is legal, it is up to the driver to determine if they feel comfortable driving a particular route. If you feel ‘high traffic volumes’ are a problem in your area, you should contact local traffic management authorities.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk