It’s probably just me but it really annoys me, Why do people install a sat nav program that it designed to take you the fastest route, then complain when it does because its not the “normal” route.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
- Albert Einstein
Because they’re people?
NI area manager (L4) Waze/WME Beta tester - iPhone 4s/5s iOS 7.0.3 (3GS 6.3.4 jail broken)
There can be a number of reasons. Here are a few at random.
- Waze is a bit fundamentalist about fastest route. It will route you an extra 20 miles to save 30 seconds. While I normally do want to save time, I’m also keen on saving petrol. There is a balance, and I’m not sure Waze has it right.
Interestingly, Waze is not fundamentalist on shortest route. It will still normally keep to reasonable roads, not single-track country lanes. I’ve in the past used another SatNav which was the other way round, fastest route would be sensible, shortest route once tried to get me stuck in a ford.
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Waze sometimes gets it wrong. It may know about a hold-up on a major route, but not realise that all the diversion routes have now got bunged up as well. Particularly common (see other threads) when it knows that a motorway is slow, but hasn’t yet had any users stuck on the equally congested slip roads on and off to a roundabout.
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the user doesn’t realise that there is a shortest route option.
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the user has fallen foul of the bug in the current iPhone release of Waze, whereby the shortest/fastest menu frequently has incorrect captions, and has chosen the wrong one.
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the user is an idiot. Not a common problem, but it does happen.
Hi,
One does have to ask, if you have a “normal route” why are you using satnav for guidance?
You’ll likely know where potential blockages are and may also know how to route around them.
When using guidance, Waze has not yet rerouted me to save time, it just tells me that the journey will be x longer because there is traffic ahead or x shorter because a jam has cleared.
As ditchi56 says, different software will route differently. Try google maps to calculate a fastest route, it often sends you 15/20 miles further than you need to travel because the road types are quicker. Never mind the 10 miles there and back detour to get you to the faster road type!
Salt. Pinch.
So, user expectation of what Waze will deliver against what that user knows already and prefers to do.
Des. . . 
Mrs Twister and I were discussing this on the drive home yesterday - she’d also prefer the fastest route option to be more flexible and trade off time against distance/sticking to main roads. Personally I’d prefer fastest/shortest to always return the fastest/shortest route unless additional options are provided to modify the results. What I tend to find though is that the fastest route isn’t always fastest, either because when I open up the routes screen there’s a faster route already calculated but not being used, or because during the drive the app will show the “there’s a faster route” popup, but the eta shown in the popup is then later than the current eta shown at the bottom of the screen…
Whilst we’re on the subject of routing annoyances, something Mrs T and I agree on is that the lack of consistent traffic highlighting is a real pain in the bum - having to trust that the routing servers are giving you the best route through the madness ahead, rather than giving the driver the option of using their local knowledge to beat the jams (or decide that it’s not worth following the Waze route around the traffic because the route it thinks is clear is almost certainly going to be clogged up with non Wazers also trying to avoid the obvious jam).
And just to get my moneysworth out of this post… when we DO decide to trust in the routing server and actually want to follow the provided route, can we please have some other options for route highlight colours that are colour-blindness friendly? Daytime driving is fine even with the default colours let alone the myriad of options we have to play with here, but when the app switches over to the non-changeable night colours, my red-green deficiency kicks in and renders the purple route almost indistinguishable from the blue hues of the roads. I could leave the app permanently in daytime mode and have no difficulty seeing the route day or night, but then I’d have reflection problems on the windscreen and side window, which is even more of a pain…
Lets just put this in context too.
Two UR’s raised here, both for coming off taking the slightly longer way around the roundabout, rather than using the off ramp.
Without even using waze I know that the roundabout method is quicker when there is traffic (maybe there wasn’t) - Its’ even been explained to one of the users TWICE - yet still disagree.
EDIT: In response to some of twisters comments, I think the highlighting issues are people see a road travelling at 5mp when it should be 30 and assume it should be highlighted as slow, BUT at that time of day it always travels at 5mph so it doesn’t highlight it, it is considered normal for that time of day. I certainly have noticed a reduction in the highlighting, is that because waze have “tweaked” the settings or because the data is now more accurate, so it knows the, for example, the m25 at the dartford toll is always slow at x o’clock so doesn’t bother.
With regards to the “there is a faster route” I think there is certainly an enhancement that needs to be made around this feature, it often just pops up with no reason why, and often shows the same time, it seems to work (mostly) but not always evident why its doing it, often when it does it, I go into routes to see what its doing and why.
Why not reply that Waze has almost certainly correctly offered the fastest route (this time), and explain how to find the shortest-route option if that is preferred?
Also there is this:
https://www.waze.com/wiki/How_Waze_calculates_routes#You_are_the_driver
It’s not just that. The thing about Waze that REALLY irritates me is that it doesn’t always offer you the fastest route when it knows there is one. It seems to prioritise Motorways too highly.
On my commute every morning it tries to route me via the M25 (unless it is at a complete standstill) on a 31 mile route that is usually reported to be 50-55 mins. If you hit “routes” there is always the more direct A25 route of 21 miles and the time is always about 5 minutes less than the M25 route. If it knows that there is a significantly shorter and faster route then why does it always offer the M25 route first? Sometimes it’s really anal about saving a few seconds but when there is a 5 minute saving available it still offers you a longer motorway route. It doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
Needless to say I usually go the shorter, faster, direct route but it irritates me none the less that I have to manually select it every morning. I have taken the M25 route a number of times just to see and Waze does calculate the time right - it does take longer that way in the morning rush hour. Outside rush hour it is usually a bit quicker to go that way.
For the evening return home there is not much in it time wise at the time I usually end up leaving work. Sometimes it offers me the M25 and sometimes the A25.
David
That may be the intention, but in practice it doesn’t always work like that, or at least the algorithm used to decide what is and isn’t normal isn’t always getting it right - the times when I see a road local to me highlighted generally don’t coincide with instances of the traffic on that stretch of road being noticeably heavier/slower than it usually is at that time of day. Given that it doesn’t seem to work properly, and given how many people either assume the highlights are based on absolute comparisons of current traffic speeds against long-term averages for that stretch of road rather than the historical average just for that specific time of day, or (myself included) would prefer it if that’s how it did work (as my wife says, even if you understand how the system works, it’s still bloody frustrating to end up sat in a jam that Waze knew about all along but didn’t bother to warn you about until after you’d got stuck in it and dropped your own traffic report pin).
Sometimes it seems like the Waze designers are so focused on how the system behaves purely as a means of providing routes between A and B, it feels as if they’ve completely forgotten about how their human end users assume information will be provided, or how they’ll react when the client does something because it’s the logical thing to do from a data perspective, despite being utterly infuriating from a human expectation perspective. If there are no faster alternative routes, then of course telling me there’s a jam up ahead is pointless from the overall “get me to my destination ASAP” point of view, but it’s far from pointless in keeping me informed about this particular bit of the journey…
Another annoyance I forgot about earlier - which genius at Waze thought aggregating the traffic and hazard reports within x hundred yards of one another was a good idea? Fair enough to aggregate them when they’re within a few yards of one another, but when it combines reports of two completely different hazards, or keeps on placing new traffic reports several hundred yards further up the road than where the traffic is now, just because 10-15 minutes ago the first report was made all the way up there, it reduces the effectiveness of the report markers. It used to be that I could see exactly how traffic was building up during the rush hour by seeing the progression back along the road of successive traffic markers, which combined with the highlighting gave me a damn good picture of the traffic conditions. Now, all we see is one pin with an ever increasing blue-ringed count next to it, which at least lets us know the traffic is still there, but generally no longer reflects the true location of the traffic buildup.
The obsession Waze has with the fastest route regardless of mileage is crazy. Similarly the fact that it knows a faster route but defaults to the motorway route is a problem I often suffer from: hitting “routes” will reveal a faster one, or at the very least one that is exactly the same time but a great deal shorter in mileage.
Now that Google has acquired Waze, maybe Waze will eventually get the Google traffic data, which is so much more detailed and real-time than Waze’s. I’ve suffered a 2-hour delay that Waze seemed to be quite ignorant of, and with each minute that passed simply added a minute to the arrival time, without ever figuring out that when you’re virtually stationery for mile after mile, your average speed is not exactly going to be 70mph any time soon.
I travelled through London the other day and just absolutely knew that Waze’s time would be hopelessly optimistic. I bet it would take an extra half an hour, but I was also wrong: Waze was only optimistic by 15 minutes. But that’s pretty bad on a journey that’s only 50 minutes anyway. It’s because of the appallingly out-of-date and inaccurate traffic data.
Other way round I think. Google is getting wazes data. There is a new algorithm in testing which is less reliant on road type. But then I bet people will end up moaning why not just take the motorway.
Personally I never have had any issues with the data that waze shows. It’s generally very accurate with my times. Even up London.
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If you look at the live Google data now it is bang on. It is down to a few yards and up to the second in response. This is because it is collected from anyone with an Android phone who has said “yes” to the question about using your location information.
So look at your own area on Google… watch out of the window… it is absolutely fantastic.
On the other hand I can go to the end of my road and hit a traffic jam that Waze knows nothing about: 5 minutes added to journey time before you really get going…
I disagree that Google is fantastic. I frequently see mis or unreported jams. Few weeks back I sailed through a 2 mile stretch that was listed as deep red and saw 1 car in either direction.
As for getting into or out of London I’ve always found Google to be way too optimistic and Waze nearly dead on. That may be a feature of the roads near me rather than anything more fundamental.
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I think basically it’s hit or miss depending on the number of users in your area and what times they drive
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Where traffic reporting is concerned the end user experience is driven by how quickly/accurately the system can detect a build up of traffic, and how quickly/accurately it can detect when things are getting back to normal again - it’s frustrating to be directed into the tail end of a jam that’s clearly been building up for some time yet isn’t being reported in the client, and it’s equally frustrating to be directed all around the houses to avoid a jam that is being reported, only to find out that it’s long been cleared and you’ve just picked your way along some insanely narrow country lanes for nothing…
Reporting a build-up is fairly easy given sufficient users - you just wait until enough user clients report they’re travelling slower than usual, and tada you’ve got yourself a jam… And until the jam is marked on the map (or reported via other means - radio, matrix signs etc) then more and more users will continue to pile into the growing jam, providing more and more data to reinforce that which has already been collected.
In contrast, once the jam has been marked and people are aware of it, some/several/many/most people would then want to avoid it. In doing so, they then are no longer contributing any traffic flow data for that stretch of road, so the systems are now left trying to determine when the jam has cleared with a smaller amount of data to play with. You want to avoid routing your users into traffic, yet you really do need users to be routed into where you think there’s traffic in order to provide fresh data as to whether or not the traffic is still there…
IME Google is noticeably better than Waze at reporting traffic as it builds up, particularly away from the trunk routes where Waze is strong (and is also streets ahead in terms of the spatial resolution of the data it reports), but neither are particularly good when it comes to reverting the reported traffic flows back to normal.
Aren’t Google combining data from the Highways agency and their clients?
On my commute I can take an A-Road or the M6. Waze is fairly good at making the ‘right’ choice but it does get it wrong at times. It’s mostly after a build up on the M6 which has cleared (I can see the M6 from the A-Road) but Waze doesn’t know it yet.
There’s not a way for Waze to know without sending someone in there to find out
I remember a discussion about way back about points being given for “taking one for the team”. That is, getting caught in traffic or in this case heading into reported traffic.
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