:mrgreen: http://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/licensing/newsletter/201205/didyouknow/
From slashdot, btw. http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/019213/tomtom-flames-openstreetmap
They nailed some issues with Waze maps:
“Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included ‘a high number of fields and forest trails’ classified as roads.”
Waze will still route you on non-drivable roads and there are a LOT of roads that still exist on Waze’s maps that don’t exist, are dirt, etc. Especially in non-city areas.
And Waze has lots of newly built roads that are months if not years from showing up in TomTom’s maps. That’s one thing that sold me on Waze was when over a year after a new major commuter road was opened, the quarterly TomTom updates still didn’t have the new road. And in the mean time another new commuter route expected to get a lot of traffic had been completed and opened.
Contrast that with Waze, where in the last couple weeks I’ve turned on two new roads that were just built, having them go live with in a week of their opening. One new road opens this Saturday, I missed the radio announcements so didn’t get it connected and turned on until today so it won’t be in next monday’s update but it will be in the next. A new road is added to the live maps within a week of it opening, rather than a year or more later.
TomTom should be running scared. Waze maps in Utah were more accurate than TomTom’s and that was before I started actually cleaning them up. And yes that includes deleting a lot of mountain hiking trails. With many more to delete.
I guess that all depends on the area you’re looking at. Tomtom (or more exactly the Teleatlas) maps are better in one area, waze or Navtech can be better in another one.
I have large areas (Switzerland, Austria) where we don’t even have usable aerials. If you don’t drive every road and walking trail you cannot map :oops:
For waze it mainly depends on the number of users that drive and edit. The more you have, the better the reports and thus the map becomes.
PS: This x map is better than y has been around all since I use navigation systems (almost 20 years).
I agree with all of that. I think Waze’s potential value is not in the quality of its maps or even in the speed of its updates but in the amount of traffic data it could make available - a traffic survey that runs 24/7 without interfering with the traffic. Think of the value in sequencing and timing traffic lights depending on the time of day, day of week or week of year or in making it possible to dynamically manage the traffic and get us all to work or from work using less fuel and time.