Last week Waze wanted me to get off and right back onto I-78 W after a little loop-de-loop through the streets. There was no real traffic to speak of.
Waze Waze taking you from local to express or vice-versa?
Confidence is the feeling you have before you fully understand the situation.
(Sent via mobile.)
That’s actually a good point. When you go off course, Waze will try to get you back on your original route as quickly as possible, as long as it’s at least sort of practical. This happens even if you choose to use the local lanes, despite Waze maybe originally routing you into express. To alleviate this we recommend you always use the roadway Waze suggests, if you legally (and safely) can; otherwise, you may have to stop your trip in Waze completely and re-enter your destination to avoid Waze trying to get you back to the original roadway at every semi-practical interchange.
I don’t think that was it though I honestly can’t recall. You can see Waze putting us back onto the local lanes and I think we were local already, but maybe not.
However even if it was this, it’s a sign of Waze’s overly aggressive habit of putting you back on the path it wants, even if that re-routing loses time. In this case, for example, there’s no way that doing this loop to go from express to local is faster than just waiting for the crossover coming up just ahead.
Wake does this a lot to me. Here’s an older post on the topic.
I believe what’s happening in the back-to-route scenario is that Waze is finding the shortest way back to the previously calculated fastest route. I think this reduces the burden on the servers a opposed to recalculating the entire route. Unfortunately, if this is true, parallel roadways like the turnpike and express/local lanes defeat the utility of that approach.
Since you don’t feel this occurred here I’ll investigate the map when I’m not mobile.
-NJM
Confidence is the feeling you have before you fully understand the situation.
(Sent via mobile.)
Thanks. The back-to-route stuff can be really awful in areas where there are many alternatives. There also seem to be other scenarios in which Waze doesn’t provide obvious alternate routes and when you start on them, deviating from the assigned path, it ends up finding that route and giving it an equal or lesser travel time than the one it initially put you on.
It often takes much less data to get you back to a somewhat nearby point on your original route than to download a completely new route, so not only is it conserving the routing servers, which is important too, but it’s also saving you data, which, I’m sure is always welcome since most US data connections are metered in some way, shape, or form. 