Suggestions: detect parking vs slow traffic

Map Editors Community Community Issues And Requests
1

It ia annoying that if I forget to exit waze properly, it thinks I am in traffic even if I am already at home/my destination or in a parking lot.

It would be nice if it could detect known parking locations and not assume one is in traffic if there
Also, a popup asking if one is parking (could be the same as the ‘are you in traffic’ one) could be useful, before it goes ahead and tells sverybody the road outside my house is congested when in fact it isnt.

2

Hi Sejtam,

I guess this is very problematic. How should waze detect parking locations? In residential areas such as suburbs you might be allowed to park anywhere along the road. I don’t know how it should be possible to automatically tell the difference between a car which is actually stuck in traffic and a car that just stopped to park in that case.
As far as I know, when a street is marked as “parking lot road” in the map, waze won’t generate traffic reports when you stop on it.
A popup might be a solution. But when you forget to exit waze properly and it’s running on your device inside your pocket, will you notice the popup? :?

Maybe it would help to add a button to the menu to put waze in parking mode, when you put in a short break. That way you wouldn’t have to complete exit waze to avoid false traffic warnings.
However this still would not be able to cope with users who just forget that waze is running, when parking their car. :roll:

Gordonski

3

Waze has stated that they are not interested to add a button to pause traffic reporting. They don’t think that it is intuitive. They want to handle this in an automated way.

Also, the are you in traffic prompt does not suppress traffic jam reports if you press no. The main function of that prompt if that if you choose yes it allows you to place a manual traffic report. Once you place the traffic report the automated traffic jam reporting becomes more ‘sensitive’ (as Waze describes it) in that area. The theory is that once you place a manual report Waze now knows that there is traffic on that segment and can more easily create a jam that is used for route and ETA calculations.

As editors we can add gas station landmarks, parking lots landmarks, and parking lot roads to help suppress traffic jams. But as stated, it’s a huge task to do this everywhere and can clutter the map with landmarks. In addition, Parking Lot roads can cause other problems since they are non-routable roads. Waze can’t accurately route through a series of Parking Lot roads (it chooses the least number of segments to get you out of the Parking Lots vs the most efficient way based on tour destination) and may break one-way road and turn restrictions when exiting the Parking Lot Road.

Also, if gas station and parking lot landmarks are placed without care and overlap areas where jams sound be generated, this may suppress real traffic jams.

The best solution at this time is to turn Waze off when you stop navigating (gas, coffee, pull over to text or take a phone call, etc). In addition, you should turn Waze off as soon as you drive off of a road into a Parking Lot. In most cases this will avoid a false traffic jam. If you are on a route, Waze will automatically continue the route when you re-start Waze.

Of course Waze should only be used when moving with the flow of traffic in a vehicle. It’s not to be used on public transportation that make stops, airplanes, trains, subways, bicycles, walking, etc. It may not be appropriate to use on a motorcycle unless you are moving at the same speed as the rest of the vehicle traffic. If you are on a motorcycle weaving though the traffic, you are contributing inaccurate data to Waze in traffic conditions.

4

The tricks are:

  1. identifying the behavior that indicates a parked vehicle vs. a vehicle in traffic, and
  2. detecting these conditions quickly (i.e., not as part of the back-end track-analysis process)The driver is as likely as not to exit the vehicle with the phone–so the phone might be virtually motionless for an extended period (which begs the question, “how long does a traffic jam take?”), or it will start to exhibit low-speed Brownian Motion.

IIRC, responding with “Cancel” to the “Are you in traffic?” popup is the way to discourage Waze from generating a traffic report. (At least it was in 2.x; I have yet to see that popup in 3.x.)

Unfortunately, having to turn off Waze fails their own standards: it’s neither automated, nor intuitive. As an AM, I tend to leave driveways alone when I find them (typically from basemap), and add at least stubs for parking lots where their lack generates Map Problems. (I don’t view this as a “hack” because, in this case, I’m circumventing a software issue by adding accurate information to the map.)

5

Is it bad that I know exactly what that is with out following the link? :geek:

6

I have seen the prompt in Waze 3.x. It had been previously reported that pressing either no or cancel does not stop a jam from being reported.

7

I agree. But Waze has yet to address this effectively. It’s the best option at this time from a Wazer perspective using the application. Yes, there are ways to suppress via editing (mentioned above with cons), but most Wazers are not editing.

8

Yes. But as mentioned above this can sometimes cause other problems - especially if the junction of the Parking Lot road to another road type has turn restrictions. In some cases, Waze will ignore the turn restriction when exiting the Parking Lot segment. Both myself and AlanOfTheBerg have reproduced this behavior. As they are working now, Parking Lot segments can cause just as many issues (or more) than they solve.