Hi, I have an UR from a user stating that Waze has not learned his preferred route. I’ve looked into it and can see now reason as to why (as per my updates to his UR).
Can anyone else see any reason why it would refuse to offer his preferred route?
Waze does not learn routes. It learns destinations for your daily commute to and from work.
Hi Tony,
I’m fairly sure it does learn preferred routes, in fact the mechanism (and a request to be able to disable it when testing) was discussed at the UK meetup.
They explained that it also learns “how much” you prefer that route, i.e. how much time you are willing to “waste” in order to take your preferred route before it will suggest an alternative.
This feature was, according to my notes, said to be coming “soon”.
Here are the routes from Newmarket to Bury: https://www.waze.com/en-GB/livemap?lon=0.71345&lat=52.24914&zoom=17&from_lat=52.24723&from_lon=0.40771&to_lat=52.24914&to_lon=0.71345
I suggested to the user that he drives the “wrong way” to teach Waze the traffic speeds. Maybe it is quicker after all.
I can’t see the point of Waze learning a preferred route. If you love your route so much, you don’t need Waze to be navigating, you could just run the map.
I want Waze to actively look at potential routes and give the best (quickest) option available. There is no added value in simply talking me through a route I know well already.
In my opinion, learning routes that are slower will harm confidence that Waze is performing its key skill – finding the quickest route.
I have been testing Google Navigation recently, and find that although it tends to be less likely to take small side roads, it dynamically looks at routing and quite often will indicates alternative routes branching off, with a label saying something like “Same ETA” or “5 mins slower”. This is great and allows a choice and the ability to use local knowledge. It also adds confidence that Google is looking for the best route.
I think it can be useful if it works as described. For instance, there is a quicker route from my house to my parents, but it is a winding country road and although it is about 5 mins quicker and several miles shorted I’d pretty much always want to take the alternative route.
However, if there was a massive pileup causing my alternative route to now be 45 minutes slower I’d like Waze to kick in and send me the back route.
The above behaviour was how it was described at the meetup.
The problem is where exactly you draw the line. I’d not be happy with adding 5 minutes on my commute - unless I positively choose to do so.
Whenever I want to take a prettier/easier route, I ignore Waze and take it.
Surely it’s better to be directed along the quickest route (based on current conditions) and make an informed decision? That’s precisely what I want from Waze
Quite, this isn’t something that would affect any other user but yourself.
If you followed the Waze suggested route almost every time it wouldn’t affect you at all.
However for me, with my driving habits, it would learn.
Sounds like the best of both worlds to me?