New Jersey turnpike

Map Editors Community United States New Jersey
1

The turnpike in Waze doesn’t seem to realize that cars can go in the truck lanes as well as the cars only lanes and it is quite frustrating when it tells you to take the car lane and all of a sudden you are in an hour of traffic while the truck lane (that cars can take) is empty. It’s also frustrating when you take the truck lane and it continuously tries to reroute you to the cars only lane. Hopefully they can fix this

2

That’s interesting, it generally tells me to take the truck lane on the Tpk. I wonder if I have it set in some sort of way.

3

Waze is aware that all vehicle types supported by the app are permitted to use both NJ Turnpike roadways, except when closed. Both roadways also have equal access to all interchanges. This means that Waze really has no mathematical predisposition to choose one roadway over the other. Assuming, for a given trip, both roadways are moving at comparable speeds over the section of your trip, Waze will choose one pretty much at random.

We have to keep in mind a few caveats in working around Waze’s limited support for a unique road like the NJ Turnpike:

  • The predictive analysis of traffic buildup is limited to long term patterns (think buildups that happen the same time of the day/week every week)
  • Availability of alternatives - if the other roadway has the same analysis, we’re back to the effectively-random selection
  • If traffic suddenly builds up after you’ve already entered one of the roadways, Waze might not be able to route around it, since Waze will typically not detour traffic through services areas, or other such unofficial hacks.
  • If you deliberately don’t use the roadway Waze suggests, the best thing to do is cancel navigation and re-select your destination. Otherwise Waze may keep trying to get you back to the other roadway as the quickest way back to the route you were on before you “strayed.”
  • Sometimes, the 2 parallel roadways may be too close together to trigger a recalculation, so you may need the same treatment as the above bullet, especially if heading northbound toward the “mixing bowl,” where left-vs-right turns may be reversed per roadway.

Hope this helps!

4

I will add that Waze does track both historical speeds over both roadways, and realtime slowdowns. I drive the Turnpike regularly between exits 7A and 9-11 and I have found that Waze chooses the fastest route most of the time, and almost always when there is a problem like construction or an accident that I don’t know about.