Waze sometimes announces an exit in a confusing way. This happens all over Houston, but the example I encounter most frequently is traveling south on State Highway 6, west side of Houston, as it approaches I-10. The waze voice tells me, “Exit to Highway 6”. That’s confusing, because I’m already on Highway 6.
What would probably help is if the feeder or service road had its own name. That way the voice could say, "Exit to Highway 6 feeder road "[or “service road”, “access road”, whatever].
Note that the map and the directions are generally correct, and I have been driving in this area for years. There’s no question about the right way to go, but the voice instructions are confusing.
Edit: of course, the way the Austin roads are named could potentially affect addressing, based on the earlier discussion. I’m sure we’ll get some area/region/county managers’ input on this.
Frontage road naming is one of my pet peeves. Street addresses, verbal directions and the way drivers perceive their names all contribute to the confusion. I have been thinking about this a lot and have no good answer yet. If I can find the time, maybe I will construct a document with all the issues and a proposed solution, but not today.
The discussion mentioned in Edit 2: of PvilleT’s posting is a great example of the uniform disarray about naming (disregarding the whole discussion about road type which is another matter all together).
Let me try to summarize the issues as I see them and hope that others will chime in and add/modify. I find that defining the problem well, prevents bad solutions (well most of the time).
Street addresses are tied to streets using the Waze street address system. That means the NAME of the street matters.
Tying a street address to a limited access highway defeats the purpose of the address in routing which leads to the belief that the “frontage road” needs to have a correct street name.
Mostly in urban areas, limited access highways have highway numbers like US-183 or I-35, but sometimes have street names as well, usually because the highway was not always limited access. Signage “tends” to give the street name to the frontage road and the highway name to the limited access highway. To make it more complicated, sometimes the frontage road and the highway have the same name for the purposes of street addresses ( I was surprised when I found an example of this in Lubbock)
At major perpendicular road intersections, the left and right hand directional signs for the frontage road usually have the highway number on them and NOT the street name.
I think our Goals are:
a) Good audio routing directions to the users of Waze that may not be familiar with the streets and highways they are routing across.
b) Accuracy of the map
c) Ability to have addresses in the Waze system that are tied to the correct street name and location.
d) Any solution has to live within the limitations of the way Waze routing works today (even though we might have suggestions to the developers about modifications to that behavior).
By the way, I find the “service road”/“frontage road” discussions interesting. Texas is one of the few places where building a frontage road is almost uniformly designed into urban and semi-urban limited access highways. Most states don’t do that. These frontage roads are somewhat different from service roads in that service roads are usually pre-existing roads that are left in place to “service” the driveways of businesses and houses that would be disconnect from the road system by the limited access highway as it is built. Texas Frontage Roads often become major thoroughfares on their own, with large amounts of through traffic.
I’ve never been a fan of how Andrewfatcat does primary roads, but I can’t find a counter argument against it. However, if you come across and service roads that are service road types, please change them to streets.
Thanks for the replies. I knew it was complicated, but I hadn’t thought it all the way through.
@PvilleT: Yes, I prefer the Austin way, not the Houston way. For Houston drivers, the Katy Freeway is exactly the same as I-10, and each one is considered to include both a freeway and a feeder portion. To label the feeder as “Katy Freeway” and the highway as “I-10”, or vice versa, is just asking for trouble.
@ctpoole: Since the feeder is a separate roadway, the driver needs to be told to exit the highway to enter the feeder. But then, the street address must be given the highway and not the feeder.
It is tricky and Google hasn’t figured it out either. have reported two problems to them about the Katy Freeway in the past six months. But there’s got to be an elegant way to handle this.
One suggestion:
Store the address in the database as “12345 Katy Freeway Service Rd”. That would always get the driver to the right place.
To make it look nice, and match the conventional addressing scheme:
The sections of the freeway that have a service road should have a flag or attribute that says, “the addresses on this section are actually on the service road.” If an address is entered that is actually on a service road, then waze converts the address to the “Service Road” version, before running the algorithm to find the route.
Segments that are service roads have a flag that says, “this is a service road.” Whenever the road or any address on the road needs to be displayed, it is first converted to the main road name (here “Katy Freeway”).
But addresses along interstates take on the form of the interstate. In your example, you say to store the address as 12345 Katy Freeway Service Rd. That’s not the true address of the business, though. It’s 12345 Katy Freeway. It’s just on the service road because you can’t have an address on the side of the interstate.
If you just use the standard address and there are service roads, then bad things happen. This proposal would still (a) give the driver correct directions but still (b) display only the official correct address of the destination (or starting point).
The proposal has three parts. The first is a one-time effort: identify all the segments of roads that have service roads that are different than the main highway. There might be a better definition, but the candidates would be: any time you give directions and have to say, “Enter the highway” or “exit the highway”. Those segments would be renamed by adding a code to the official name of the road way. That code could be “Service Rd”, the letters “ZZZ”, or a special character, and could be added to the beginning or end of the character string. Those are details that do not matter; no user will ever see it, only the code.
Next modify two routines in the waze programming. The modifications would have an effect only if the address stored in waze includes the “Service Rd” code.
The first modification: after checking that the address given by the user is valid, check whether the address is on a segment that is known to be a feeder road. If so, then just for internal use, add the “Service Rd” code to the official address. Then the algorithm uses that address to compute the shortest route.
Everything else would work the same, until the step that gives the directions back to the user. In that step, the “Service Rd” code or character would be trimmed off before display.
(It was a long time ago but I have a degree in computer science and used to be a software engineer.)
Service roads are going the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. As far as the modifications you speak of, I can pass that on to staff, but it’s going to be low on their priority list. Also, Waze gets its address information from Google, so there would have to be a change at Google for Waze to really take affect for addresses along freeways. I know, it’s a PITA, but that’s how it is.