waze is nearly useless in most parts of Sydney Australia because there’s not enough users yet. But waze has wet my appetite for traffic avoidance now & I’m thinking of going & getting a tom tom as a commercial service.
Anyone got experience with tom tom in a waze poor area? Is it any good? Does waze offer stuff tom tom doesn’t?
Would it be possible, if I paid some kind of subscription fee or something, for waze to integrate tom tom’s data? Or is that just too complex?
If you’re looking for traffic avoidance I was never impressed with TomTom - reports varied widely in accuracy, and they were usually delayed. Waze is good at noticing traffic when it starts, but not so good at noticing when it stops. At least it’s more deterministic than TomTom was in my experience.
Probably impossible given their respective business models.
Today waze sucked for me. No help at all, & lots of traffic stuck everywhere. Need more wazers Apple Maps was more useful. My wife tells me it uses tom tom data. At least waze would be happy to know that our Roads & Traffic Authority’s app was less useful than tits on a bull.
Start pushing it on all your friends, getting the word out is the only way to improve the service. Oh that and edit like crazy to make sure Waze knows there are alternate routes that work.
Yeah, I push it hard already but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference - for the last week or so there were practically no wazers on the major Sydney routes I was on. There’s 5 million people in this city; if you picked it up and up put it in America it’d be like the 11th largest city or something (or so I’ve heard). We’re not that small. But waze just hasn’t caught on here.
Yesterday I actually forgot to turn waze on. I’m sold on the idea & I’m a 100% fanatic. And I forgot. Knowing myself well eventually I will stop using it altogether & it’ll just be one of life’s disappointments. And the reason will be that while I believed in it, and wanted to support it, @ the end of the day it just didn’t have enough users to make it work.
A very wize friend of mine once told me to never bring a problem without also bringing a solution. So what I’d say is then is this: given I’m willing to pay for Tom Tom data that I can get via Apple Maps for free, then if waze licensed that data - or maybe data from several sources - to keep up with Apple Maps at the very least - then waze might be more useful - and I’d pay a subscription for that. Or waze needs to find another way to distinguish itself. Nobody ever chats in Sydney - how can you chat & drive? So the social networking part isn’t working quite so well here. What else can waze do that nobody else does? Petrol prices - that’s a good one - though not really applicable here in Aus. Police is good, but heck I can’t report that while I’m driving! Deals? Combine with groupon or something for discount vouchers? “You’re passing McDonalds - quote voucher XYZ for a free Little Mac”? I dunno. I suppose that with 20 million users you’re not that worried about little old Sydney.
btw - the tom tom data via Apple Maps also sucked a few times. So it seems that I’m just stuck.
Yep, that and keep editing, it seems there’s a magic level of road quality in an area. When the roads need a lot of fixing people try it and quit. But once the roads hit a certain threshold of usefulness, usage in an area starts climbing fast.
For example: several months ago when I first got CM status I responded to an UR in my area about a problem on a trip to Las Vegas. I pulled up LV and it was a mass of UR’s, but when I pulled up the GPS tracks, once you got off the freeways going through the city the tracks practically disappeared. People were trying waze, getting bad routes, making a few UR’s and then bailing. As far as I could tell there were no active editors in the metropolitan area. So I went to work, after a few weeks of spending the majority of my time working those maps, GPS tracks started appearing on more and more side roads, and then I started running across other editors working the city. Now days when I happen to look in, UR’s are less common and rarely more than a couple days old, And GPS tracks are far more widely found than when I first wandered into the area.
I’ve seen the same or similar thing happen in the Reno/Carson City NV area as well in a few smaller cities in Utah.
For me that’s not an issue because I don’t use waze for navigation, what I want waze for is traffic avoidance. So when waze tells me to go in to the centre of Sydney and spent hours sitting around in traffic when there’s a major route off Sydney harbour on to the Anzac bridge, I just PMSL and drive on. I have tried to get in and work out the problem but it’s really difficult because there are multiple levels and lanes that our traffic authority can program so that the lanes can be one way either way depending on demand. I also changed it so that you CAN follow Livingstone Road, Marrickville NSW south of Marrickville Road north, but then the map seemed to revert? It was bizarre. I’ll give it another try.
It just tweeted again for people to please join & even suggested to some major tv stations here that they do a story on waze.
I don’t use waze for the routing and I don’t fuss about the traffic reports most times the traffic jams don’t exist and probably based on 1 wazer driving down a suburban road at 10kph meaning waze will say blah blah road a dead end street will have standstill traffic on it lol.
But I always turn it on for every drive it’s mainly to edit and fix up problems in areas that I’m driving through.
I also assume this will build up some route data and traffic data I do traffic reports as well.
See what happens I guess.
The TomTom maps use an official traffic management data provider that also includes the weather as well.
I would suspect the Apple traffic data is the same as google’s traffic data which just shows up speed data.
Yes, simply driving with Waze on will build up historical data on the roads and will benefit the system as long as you a driving “normally” on those roads.
I’m also disappointed with Waze in Sydney. I used it when living in London and it was great. But for my trips between Liverpool and Crows Nest it is useless, always taking me to congested roads without knowing it.
So I switched to MetroView, for the price it is pretty good and Tomtom Traffic info (in app subscription) helps.
I tried Waze again few times but no luck.
I then decided to contribute with editing and paving maps but then the map editor sees me as having never driven so does not allow me to edit anything. And the new update of the app on ios just doesnt le me pave…
qhphotography, Waze is infinitely close to useless for me personally for traffic avoidance in Sydney & even if people here used it in it’s social context to chat and share info I can’t participate because I’m driving anyway.
However I keep using Waze because I see it as an extremely good idea and I want to support free services such as this. In other words I’m investing my battery power & remembering to do it on every drive for a better future (& secretly hoping Waze acknowledges my effort in some way eventually as a loyal Sydney pioneer). The thing with Waze is that unless a lot of people use it, and stick with it, it can’t gain the critical mass it needs to be useful here, & then the only choice we’ll have are commercial services.
I wish there were some way to get other traffic monitoring services data in to waze, even if I had to pay.
Thanks guys connecting to the right server solved my map editing issues.
I too am still using Waze to improve it and incite other people to join. I also use Gmaps whenever needed. Now that they joined together I hope that both will benefit from each other in terms of traffic monitoring.
Apple Maps was more useful. My wife tells me it uses tom tom data. At least waze would be happy to know that our Roads & Traffic Authority’s app was less useful than tits on a bull.