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Post by alexxys
Another example of traffic missing in Waze.
Date/time: April 17, 2018 08:10 am UTC+1.
Google ETA: 14 min. Waze ETA: 6 min.
Start/end points.
Here two segments of Scholarstown Rd have the same name on both Google and Waze map, so my theory about different road names may not hold here. But one of the segments has actually two names on Google map, English 'Scholarstown Rd' and Irish 'Bóthar Bhaile Scallart'. May be the Irish one is used to correlate roads.
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Post by alexxys
Another example of traffic missing in Waze.
Date/time: April 18, 2018 7:26 pm UTC+1.
Start/end points.
Road names are different on Google and Waze in this example.
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Post by alexxys
Also I noticed that the exits from M50 are never red/yellow in Waze, even such heavily congested as the one above. It again can be explained by the road name differences in Google and Waze. In Google the exits are unnamed or have name "M50". In Waze all exits have names like "J12 to R113 - Knocklyon, Firhouse".
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Post by alexxys
David, thanks for pushing this issue with Waze HQ.
In the meantime I fixed some street names in Waze (R115 Stocking Ln, R115 Scholarstown Rd) and trying to fix some in Google Maps (St. Colmcille's Way and Ballycullen Rd) to make the names the same and to check whether it fixes the issue with missing traffic. I will re-check traffic in Waze next week.
davidg666 wrote:I really really hope they don't just use road names for matching - that would be crazy. We usually name roads in order to give sensible directions to users (like "J12 R113 > Knocklyon, Firhouse").
Agree. Hopefully it's something that can be easily fixed by tweaking some traffic import settings on Waze side.
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Post by alexxys
Hi David, any news from Waze HQ?
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Post by alexxys
Cool! Thank you David!
I will check the streets where saw that issue.
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Post by alexxys
Unfortunately I don't see any improvements. Waze still doesn't show traffic congestion on those "broken" roads and makes too optimistic ETAs during peak hours. I was hoping that we need to wait for some time until something completely updates somewhere in Waze. But now it's difficult to check the issue because traffic became super light in July and there are no congestions on my daily routes.

But there is another problem that's opposite and that's happening on the same roads. When there is a very light traffic, Waze sometimes makes very pessimistic ETAs as if there was a very bad traffic (without actually showing the bad traffic) and sometimes creates super suboptimal routes (see below). For me it looks like an indication of the same problem, namely Waze doesn't import Google traffic on those "broken" road segments.

BTW, I renamed several segments in Waze and Google to make the names the same but it didn't help.

Example of a very bad route and how it actually should be (permalink to
the problematic segments
):
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Post by alexxys
David, can you please forward the information above to Waze HQ as well?
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Post by alexxys
David, That issue happened on June 22nd 2018 at 8:54am UTC+1.
I see similar issue at the same place every working day at about 9am-9:20am. Waze usually makes ETA about 4 minutes bigger than the actual driving time when the traffic is very light. Sometimes it's even bigger which leads to those wrong detours.
The wrong ETA happens mostly on these segments.
Once I saw the same weird route at about 4am when the roads were completely empty.
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Post by davidg666
alexxys wrote:I doubt that Waze uses Google Maps data in Ireland. I was comparing Waze and Google Maps many times in Dublin. Waze sees only a tiny fraction of the traffic congestion that Google Maps sees. So I have a big hope that Waze routing can be improved dramatically here because I already saw such a dramatic improvement in the city I'm from.
Thanks Aleksandr.

I've just emailed our contact in Waze HQ to ask about this. Can you say what city in Russia you're from? Does it appear here, or does it have a much higher population compared to Dublin? It'd be interesting to know whether Waze shows a better view of traffic congestion just because there are more users there.

I'll let you know what we hear back from Waze HQ.

++David
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