I am new and I am curious what other information is collected when I use WAZE. Does it collect speed data?
My question is two fold. First if it collected speed data for a road then the routing could be more accurate for routing to a destination.
The negative would be if I use my bicycle to travel. Obviously my speeds would not be accurate. However, I see the bike being a nice way to update the maps in neighborhoods.
Bruce :ugeek:
Hi Cosnet, I’ll try and answer part of your questions and others will chime in here too. Your direction of travel, speed, and location is collected by the Waze servers. While I don’t know how the speed affects routing, I do know that properly classified road classes such as private roads/parking lot roads, streets, Primary Streets, etc… do affect routing.
Your speed is averaged with others for automatic jam detection and the
Location is used to produce tracks on the map for you to edit the road geometry if the need arises and sometimes that data is used for automatic road-geometry editing by the server itself.
Using it while bicycling should not affect the average speed too much as long as there are some auto drivers also driving the same road to average it out.
You might see some automatic traffic reports since at this time there is no way to indicate to the servers that you are not in a car (It sounds like this idea is being batted around).
Hi and thanks for the response… I think waze is 90% there and with a few changes like mode of transport ie bicycle or car it could route accordingly. However, that feature is really minor. What would really be great is if it would collect data from other users for routing. So if I am in bad traffic and Sally is zipping along on a nearby street I could say, “Check for faster route” and it would reroute me to avoid the jam. I believe TomTom has this feature in Europe.
Well thats the entire thought of Waze actually, and the way it works!
Hi,
Unless I am missing something Waze does not route you around traffic like other systems. It may give me a bunch of reports that traffic is bad but it really does not help me get to my destination on a different route. Unless I am missing something and I could be… I am new but it certainly is not obvious.
It does. And if new traffic information becomes available, it will give a message like ‘Updating route due to new traffic information.’, which does exactly what you are describing.
It really does, this is the key feature of Waze, and the main reason it’s such a great product.
BUT, for Waze to function well, it needs enough users driving the roads collecting speed data and recording roads.
We’re not there yet, but we’re growing and waze will become better with each new user using it.
WAZE, please add the bicycle feature soon. I am going to turn on WAZE during my cyclomute in to work every day. I don’t want to mess up your numbers. It will also be interesting to see how bicycle travel compares to car travel through inner cities.
BykMor
I would say go for it already… we just had this discussion in the swedish forum and agreed that it’s better to get a larger grid of roads then the fact that the speeds are correct on all of them!
And if the roads already are there lets just hope someone else is using waze to, and driving so that the speeds doesn’t go down all that fast!
have you cosidered bicycling and thus causing a fake traffic jam on a possibly empty street can get other users rerouted to longer/worse routes?
Agree with the request for a bicycle/running/walking mode. Sure it’s still worth doing it to map out new roads, but if it’s taking bad data on speeds, direction of traffic etc. and negating all the things that make Waze unique and better than e.g. Google Maps, why wouldn’t I just use Google maps instead?
Besides, I would think it’d be an important selling point for Waze to support more environmentally friendly forms of transport. In cities like Melbourne, bike paths and walking routes are just as important as roads in determining how to get somewhere. And as a jogger I would love for Waze to have a feature to track my path, measure the distance of the run and even the average speed, speed in different areas etc.
I just returned from a 35 mile bicycle ride doing a lot of road goggling in my area, found one snowflake and added several new roads. I can report that my route on my waze screen was full of speed warnings caused by my slow speed. They were seldom traveled roads with minimum traffic so I am sure that I did not cause any re-routing to occur. Had they been well-traveled another waze user’s data would have deleted by slow speed warning.
Waze isn’t currently designed for bicycle use and by using waze you’ll be skewing the average speeds down, evidenced by the speed/traffic warnings!
There is a uservoice entry to add vehicle differentiation!