I have just seen a post in discord which says Waze no longer routes through Off-road / Not maintained sections of road AT ALL. Have I missed this announcement? It makes this type of road as useful as a chocolate teapot. :roll:
I have quite a few small old estates in Essex where all the Off-road / Not maintained “tracks” for want of a better word, to the houses are all unmade, but all have names. These are unadopted roads but still open to the public.
In order to be able to route to, from and through these it now seems I will need to change these to streets with the unpaved box ticked. This then makes them indistinguishable from a normal road in the WME view! (I don’t know how they appear in the App) I just hope HQ have thought to make these unpaved streets subject to the Use Dirt Roads option otherwise this will cause some issues.
If this option is now not of any use, will HQ remove the option and run a change to convert all of the current ones?
Can anyone confirm this before I start the changes? (and point me to the announcement that I seem to have missed so I can bookmark the location to avoid this happening again. )
From my enquiries about Waze now routing over said 4x4 roads, I am now convinced that the App’s dirt road preferences only refer to the unpaved tickbox. As for how they look in the App… guess what, identical to a paved segment :lol:
Interesting timing, as yesterday I was dealing with a UR which was affected by a 4x4 / off road segment.
My experimenting suggests that, as with private roads, if the destination is somewhere along the segment then it will still route along it. However, despite only being a few metres long, will take you on the scenic route to get to the other side.
Changing the dirt road option option in the app made no difference.
I’ve seen this threatened before but not sure if any change has been made - certainly when I’ve tested in recently Waze will still route along an off-road segment if it’s the only option.
It is true that off-road is a bigger penalty than using the unpaved flag. The explanation I heard was that an unpaved road could be driven (slowly) in a normal car but an 4x4/off-road segment is for roads that need a 4x4/off-road vehicle - sort of logical for one.
If so, then that would imply off-road segment should indeed not be routed… or maybe there’s a 4x4 vehicle type coming?
)