The correct location to postcode SE9 5AN is 3 Grove Place, Eltham, London, but the Waze is always showing the wrong address. What can i do?
The simple answer is not to rely on postcodes as route destinations, and instead use a fully qualified destination address - i.e. house number + street name, business name, point of interest name etc - which uniquely identifies the place you’re trying to get to.
The more involved answer is that there really isn’t much we can do about this. Waze doesn’t provide native support for mapping out the location of postcodes, so whenever someone searches for a postcode as a Waze destination, this request gets handed off to the Google Maps search API, which in turn sends back what it believes to be the location of the centrepoint of the postcode area.
For reasons known only to Google (although I suspect the “Grove Place” name may be relevant here), asking them for the location of SE9 5AN returns two results - one correctly located at the position of apartment building in Eltham called “Grove Place”, and the other incorrectly located at the position of the small residential road in Balham called - how did you guess - “Grove Place”…
Now here’s where it seems to get interesting. if I type SE9 5AN into the Waze app search box and just wait for it to generate its realtime results list, I get one result which corresponds to the “Grove Place” in Balham. If I then tap the “More results” button and then select the Google tab, it lists both the Balham and Eltham results. We know that the realtime search results list is generated from Google data, so I’m not sure why only one of the results is being shown in that with the other result only appearing on the Google tab within the full search results screen, although I wonder if it has something to do with the distance between where I currently am and where those two results are located - sitting here to the west of London, the Balham result is the closer of the two.
This also seems to affect how Waze Livemap searches for locations - asking that for the location of SE9 5AN gives either the Balham or Eltham result depending on which part of the map I’m viewing at the time I do the search. Viewing a part of the map to the west of London gives the Balham location, viewing a part of the map to the east of London gives the Eltham location…
And no, before you ask, this isn’t something we can simply fix by reporting the map error to Google themselves - postcodes (and some other searchable things) aren’t one of the bits of map data that we can generate error reports for. Which, believe me, is annoying - this isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last, such error I’ve investigated in the Google data that gets passed through to Waze.
A trick which I have used sometimes is to create a Waze “place” (category unimportant but I usually use “lodging”) with the same name as the postcode. Doesn’t prevent the wrong location appearing, but gives the user another chance of picking the right one.
Ian
… which you can then link to the Google POI to override the incorrect official coords.
Here’s one I prepared earlier for NN8 2QW …
https://www.waze.com/en-GB/editor?env=row&lon=-0.69100&lat=52.28815&zoom=6&venues=235471371.-1940188051.17283107
… although as it’s new you may need to refresh a few times for it to appear :roll:
Didn’t realise there was a Google POI for every postcode. That’s a really useful trick, is it in Wazeopedia anywhere? (and if not, could you add it please) 
It’s not in Wazeopedia, I’d personally not like to see this for anything other than when postcodes relate to single buildings, otherwise this will begin to spread to all postcodes. Obviously CAs & CMs are the boss.
As for getting it corrected in Google Map, you can always “send feedback” and this allows you to highlight the error and leave details.
Well iainhouse will get round to reading this sometime, so we’ll see what he thinks.
I can see a use for it for those new developments where several houses share a new postcode, and Google takes a few months to locate that postcode anywhere near the right place.
I think that a postcode must be some sort of POI in Google, since it’s a searchable thing that returns a set of coordinates to Waze search.
I don’t believe this will work. Postcodes are a special case: There’s an official source of the data (Royal Mail) and I don’t think Google will accept corrections from Maps users. People/companies can be funny about postcodes. Just have a look at the postcode mapping around Harrods: the postcode boundary runs along Brompton Road, but it takes a little loop eastwards around the Harrods building, so they can say they’re in Knightsbridge. :lol:
I think we generally take the right position: steering users away from using postcodes because a postcode represents a number of properties, whilst Waze can only navigate to a single point. Unfortunately, whilst I remember an old satnav I used to have working with number + postcode, Google does not respond to such a query, so it will only return the geo point for the Postcode as a whole.
Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with adding a Waze place and linking it to the Google result for a postcode - I think I proposed this right back when Google linking became available. If the Google location causes problems like routing to the wrong end of an estate, or onto a limited-access dual-carriageway passing through, or the wrong side of a dual-carriageway - then it’s a reasonable thing to do.
I’m not sure how well it will work for new postcodes that haven’t reached Google yet. I’ve seen Google simply return closely-matching (but wrong) postcodes as a result.
I’m not against fixing postcodes when they are actually wrong, just want to see us using the best method There is a minor flaw even with adding a place point which I spotted when trying to fix a postcode a few months ago and still happens.
When you enter “NN8 2QW”, the result now picks up on the new place point, thanks Andrew 
However, when you enter “NN82QW”, it returns the correct road in the results list but this is still the incorrect Google Maps location, this is of course using the dynamic results (and the livemap only ever uses Google locations). I think I’ll always try educating users even when also trying to fix these headaches.
You can give the Waze place an “alternate name” of the postcode without the space.
Great idea - have added an alternative name without the space to that one and will test again.