Your using Max speed as a synonym for a Speed Limit. There has been huge discussions about this prior.
If your referring to the max speed driven on a road segment (which can be really off, considering some may drive 70 mph on a typically 30 mph road), then, this information will again be relatively useless, unless if it used some sort of moving average for the maximum speed driven on a segment.
But then it wouldn’t even be used for routing, but to help display perpetual slow average traffic as a jam. But that’s not even needed, as Waze already knows that segment is slow.
So, basically, as I said, this suggestion would require a lot of work (think, you add in a field in the database, then you have to populate the records with information for that field, then you have to integrate the field with the servers and client, which would require a complete restructuring of the interfaces being used within the code.
EDIT: It’s never as simple as just adding another field to a database. It’s much more complicated, and would require much more work than you think.
Simply put, absolutely no gain, for a lot of work, and probably a lot of feature-breaking bugs.
Well, I just hope they fix this problem: The jam is long and waze only change the road to red usually only when I report a jam. Wazers go thru the roads that speed limit is 70km/h and waze has it with 30km/h in average. When in a jam, wazers go thru 30km/h and waze thinks its without jam.
I hope it wont work that way, or if so that they fix it.
Waze often makes routes with strange cuts via small service roads. This may also happen because of this. The primary road has the speed average lower than of the service road and waze sometimes makes crazy routes.
You may not like it, but it works. Waze knows that road is 30km/h, and it’s calculating as such.
Any of the proposed suggestions will not help solve this problem. The only other way (in my mind) is to have hourly averages compared to the global average (displayed in Livemap / Cartouche). This would be the only way to have something similar to WYSIWYG. But it would still require implementation. Luckily, though, the (already existing) data would update itself and be somewhat correct.
Waze makes cuts because it’s probably quicker at that time of day. If the main road is clogged, obviously the side roads would be quicker if there not.
Well, I disagree.
How can it works since the average of the road is 30Km/h while the normal road speed during times other than rush hours is 70Km/h? As I said, waze sometimes does stupid routes when its not necessary. Today, at late night, it made me go thru a desert road that had “speed reductors” and a longer path, just because it had a speed average higher than a shorter primary road. And I still say: Waze misses coloring red road jams just because of this average.
The average is based on Time of Day. So, during the rest of the day, Waze marks the road as 70km/h. During rush hour, at that same Time of Day, Waze marks is at 30Km/h and is suppose to account for this difference with ETA and routing.
If it’s not accounting for this difference, visible via the ETA, then please tell me. But as I understand it, you just don’t see a red jam on it. To Waze, that 30Km/h at Rush Hour is normal traffic.
Like I said, the only quick and viable way to show these red jams would be to make the coloring of jams be dependent on <current speed>/<global average speed>. Right now, it uses <current speed>/<time of day average speed>.
The Way Waze works now, it’s like the same as not having it. If I do not get information about speed or size of a jam in rush hour, is actually the same as not having waze. If you think about it, waze is only giving you an eta. I’m not seeing which way is faster so we have to trust waze that it is doing us the best route. But since it does some stupid routes, I can’t fully trust it. And i know my town better than it. That’s was the idea of the topic: if waze show us the road colors all the time it would give us a better feel about the route. If the speed average in rush time is 30kmh why not plot red in map ?
If you do that in Washington, DC, where I commute, every major road from the beltway in would be plotted in red from 6:00 - 9:30 AM and 3:00 - 6:30 PM. How would that be helpful? I already know that the roads are going to be slower during the rush. What is more helpful to me is to see which roads are slower than than their normal rush hour delay (and an indication of those that are going faster than their normal rush hour speed).
Obviously Waze is not perfect, and some stupid routes should be expected, especially if the maps are not in good quality and there are not many Wazers in the area.
However, having said that, Waze is not WYSIWYG. Your asking for it to change, and I’d honestly be okay with a user-setting on the client for display purposes (adding it as an option would take more work, but the actual setting could actually be done in three seconds (change one variable to another already pre-existing variable).
Having said that, as it is now, and if Waze had to choose between now and what you want, I’d have to disagree. CBenson said quite a bit covering it, but also, there is no real reason not to trust Waze if it has sufficient data and excellent map quality. It’ll find the proper route with the smallest ETA.
In some specific days on rush hours, roads that usually have jams sometimes have not. I think its bad when you look at the screen, see nothing and then BAM: A traffic jam. I really dont know if its just me, but…