There is a section of my route to work that for no reason get jammed quite often, but is the quickest way if its free, the trouble is its in a bit of a mobile dead zone and so doesn’t seem to get any reports.
If I do a traffic report just as I enter the segment Waze quite often says failed to send try later or similar, but why does it not report when it gets the half a mile down the road itself and the network comes back as they just seem to get lost?
Thanks
Mark
I find this a fairly common problem for reporting anything, not just traffic.
Try driving in a low coverage area and finding a problem, attempting to report it results in the same message to try later. This isn’t much help because I will be in an entirely different location later, this often results in problem areas remaining problem areas as nobody can generate reports near the actual problem.
It is a problem, it’d be useful if Waze would cache the reports and then send to server when it can. There would obviously have to be some sort of time limit so that the report still has some relevance when it finally gets posted.
Yes I’ve found it a huge problem when driving in areas like parts of Wales where mobile coverage is a rare event. Although actually in the valleys you don’t get GPS anyway… paper maps are still a necessity sometimes!
Large parts of Wales are a definite problem, there are several places in Mid Wales I have encountered issues while driving and not been able to report them, never been able to figure out where after the fact though. Some of them I have encountered on more than one occasion so I know they aren’t being fixed either.
Would be a massive improvement if Waze could do this.
Dont forget reports (especially manual) do not affect routing as much as the actual data, although they may help you make your own decision.
Also, If I remember correctly, I’m sure I remember someone saying waze will only show traffic if the segment is slower than it usually is for that time, although I could be mistaken there.
So in other words, if the road is usually backed up and moves at 15mph at 8:30 in the morning, it will take that into account, but will only show a warning if it the speed is less than that.
But don’t quote me on that, as I can’t remember where I read that, perhaps a champ can confirm?
I believe your correct in saying that the actual reports do not have an effect on routing. But other reports such as Speed Camera, Hazards, etc could be useful for other wazers.
Not sure about traffic, but for the other reports, you can select report, then report type, then report dismiss and report later…
But not sure how this works with no signal, I generally always have signal, so cant really test without a faraday cage.
I was particularly thinking of Map Issue reports. With no signal, Waze won’t let you start to make a report. And if you do try later the UR will appear in completely the wrong place.
I suspect this is one of the causes of the “sofa UR’s” that people send from home.
As an experienced Wazer, I know I can use livemap at home to put a UR in the right place (or edit the map myself), but if it’s been a long drive I’ll likely have forgotten where it was.
Reporting traffic does increase the sensitivity of the automatic traffic detection algorithm, and could mean the road colour changes sooner.
We should ask Waze to allow UR reporting when no signal, and automatically pin the location for ‘Later’.
In the meantime, it may be worth considering a different network with better coverage. See OpenSignal.com maps…
via mobile
Indeed, I intend to.
But if you look http://opensignal.com/coverage-maps/UK/ and set it to the 3G which Waze needs, you will see a lot of “white space” whichever network you select. Signal gaps will be with us for a long time yet.
Waze navigation works well without a signal (provided it had a signal or Wifi when you put the destination in). But all the other functions (petrol prices, map issue reports, etc) fail completely. The best single enhancement Waze could make would be to allow all manner of reports (including petrol price updates please) to be input without a signal, cached on the phone, and submitted automatically when the signal restores.
Just want to +1 this as I’ve been using Waze for a year and a half now and this has to be the most annoying thing about Waze which really ought to be quite simple to solve.
If the phone / waze thinks it still has a data signal, it will let you select the menu and go through making a report, but then it fails to send as you’ve lost the signal. That’s fair enough, but what isn’t is when it suggests you re-make the report later. Well “later” I won’t be in the same place and the report will be useless and wrong. It might be a car blocking the road, police or something else which is no good reporting a couple of miles down the road. It should store the report (and the location) and send when the phone next gets a data signal.
If the phone already knows you don’t have a signal, it simply won’t let you open the report menu. You can’t do anything. Again, you should be able to create the report (and hence the correct location) and send automaticaly when you have a signal.
What I’ve also found is the phone sometimes picks up a BT home-hub open wifi signal and so drops the mobile data on purpose. It usually fails to connect to the BT wifi because it was too weak and I’ve driven past it now, but typically you want to do some report there (there’s one petrol station on my commute that I regularly can’t update because of this) but it fails to send the data. Again, store the data and try again later!
Is it really that hard to fix?
I’m with jonnyhuk2! There is nothing about this behavior that makes even a little sense. There is no way I can find to resubmit the report as created, and if one tries to “retry” the report later, it’s going to have the wrong time stamp and GPS coordinates attached. Can the report packet not be stored and retransmitted as soon as a new network connection is detected, and the message changed to something that makes sense, like “No data connection. Your report will be sent as soon as a data connection is detected.”??? All mobile devices have some sort of semaphore for network connection, so coding this just cannot be that difficult.