“Avoid toll roads” and “Avoid ferries” are distinct options in the app - yet most ferries are marked as toll roads, so “Avoid toll roads” also avoids ferries.
WME already knows the road type is “ferry”, so this could easily be corrected.
Has anyone asked Waze HQ about this before?
Thanks.
URs like that are a bit of a problem, because as it currently stands, those app options serve two distinct and absolute purposes - one allows users to specify that they do not want to be routed via any part of the road network for which additional payment must be made, whilst the other allows users to specify that they do not want to be routed via a ferry regardless of whether it’s free or paid for.
There are good reasons why someone may want to avoid ferries as a mode of transport in their own right - e.g. they may prefer to take any variability out of their journey times caused by needing to wait for the next available ferry to show up, they may be prone to seasickness etc. There are also good reasons why someone might not want to have to pay tolls along any part of their route. As such, the only way to guarantee that the route being offered is one which complies with these two options as they’re currently defined is to treat them as absolutes - i.e. if you select avoid tolls then Waze will avoid all tolls, even those related to ferry crossings despite not also having the avoid ferries option selected.
The same sort of problem exists in other areas - e.g. either side of the Dartford Crossing - where the non-tolled alternative route incurs a significant detour and where someone might therefore be happy to pay that specific toll, but still not want to give Waze carte blanche to route them over any toll road elsewhere.
Short of adding complication to the app settings (something Waze has historically always been dead set against) so that users could indicate a willingness for a given restriction to be ignored if it saved an appreciable amount of time/distance vs the next best route (and then you have to consider whether you’d also need to then give the user the ability to specify just what an “appreciable” amount is as far as they’re concerned, or whether you’d just have the app use a “reasonable” threshold that works in some/many/most cases), I’m not sure there’s any way to modify how route selection works such that it’d meet the needs of users like this whilst also meeting the needs of however many other users are currently perfectly happy with the way those options behave, and would be somewhat less happy if Waze suddenly started ignoring their settings.
Thanks. Car ferries are generally not free, and I doubt anyone expects them to be. Ferries can be understood as an independent class of water-based toll road.
So “Avoid toll roads” should have no effect on ferries. Ferry selection should only be determined by the “Avoid ferries” setting.
Anyone driving around the eastern side of London certainly would do - Woolwich Free Ferry, a somewhat essential part of the A road network in that part of the capital - and users in other parts of the world would also expect them to be - e.g.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/passenger-travel/water-travel/inland-ferries
Hence my closing comment earlier - bodging a solution to meet the desires of the type of user who raised that UR will only cause problems for other types of user whos desires are already perfectly met by the existing implementation of the avoid tolls/avoid ferries options.
Perhaps some misunderstanding? The proposal is that “Avoid toll roads” would nolonger influence toll ferries, which would not be detrimental to free ferry users:
[table]
[tr]
[td]“Avoid toll roads”[/td]
[td]“Avoid ferries”[/td]
[td]Current behaviour[/td]
[td]Proposed behaviour[/td]
[tr]
[td]OFF[/td]
[td]OFF[/td]
[td]Take toll roads.
Take ferries.[/td]
[td]Take toll roads.
Take ferries.[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]OFF[/td]
[td]ON[/td]
[td]Take toll roads.
Avoid ferries.[/td]
[td]Take toll roads.
Avoid ferries.[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ON[/td]
[td]OFF[/td]
[td]Avoid toll roads.
* Avoid toll ferries *
* Take free ferries *[/td]
[td]Avoid toll roads.
* Take ferries *
.
[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ON[/td]
[td]ON[/td]
[td]Avoid toll roads.
Avoid ferries.[/td]
[td]Avoid toll roads.
Avoid ferries.[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]
That’s still what I’d consider a bodge of a solution, because anyone in an area with free ferries and no aversion to using them, would then risk being routed onto paid for ferries if they were driving in another part of the country/world, unless they altered their app settings to avoid ferries completely.
If you’re OK with requiring some users to modify their app settings based on some knowledge of the likely routes they’ll be given in different areas, then it could be argued just as reasonably that this is therefore the solution to the existing problem users such as the UR raiser have with how the app behaves now - if they want to be routed over paid for ferries, then all they have to do is allow toll roads for the duration of that journey, and then remember to disallow them again once they’re done using ferries…
The need to flip the “Avoid ferries” setting to avoid paid ferries is much more obvious than the need to flip the “Avoid toll roads” setting in order to take ferries!
The app offers distinct ferry and toll road options. The fact that ferries are implemented as toll roads is an internal detail which wazers should not be required to know or understand.