Tractors and Best Practice

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

It’s becoming that time of year again where there are a lot of slow moving road users around: tractors (and cyclists, but this is about tractors). They might not be an issue in the cities, but it can be an annoyance in the more rural areas. Especially when they decide to drive during rush hour.

Yesterday I drove behind one for a number of miles, going max 25 on a 60 road with no opportunity to overtake. I noticed that Waze didn’t record the slow speed to adjust the map accordingly. Something it should do automatically?

My question I guess is how do/can we report this? Would “moderate traffic” suffice? It doesn’t really fit the bill imo. Is there another, better fitting option I have overlooked? It would be nice if we could report slow vehicles somehow, since I’ve noticed several times that Waze doesn’t adjust the traffic flow automatically, and going 20-30 instead of 60 can make quite a difference.

Thanks for any input.

2

If you do report ‘traffic’ then Waze will be more likely to show a traffic jam, as this hazard with double the sensitivity to slow vehicles.

3

Right, so is that a good thing to do in this case, or not? IMO a jam is something else, but if that’s all we have, then it’ll have to do.

4

The likelihood of Waze picking this up purely on traffic speed probably depends on how many users are affected - and in rural areas, numbers of users are generally much lower.

The problem though is that this type of hold-up is usually quite short-lived - and of course it’s moving (slowly) from one segment to the next - so any jam marker or slow speeds may be incorrectly displayed in the app long after the tractor has passed that segment.