Waze forum

It was suggested for potholes. But I know in roads your phone would be shaking constantly. The accelerometer can be useful to give an overall quality rating for the entire segment.

Also define what makes a road good quality? New freeways for example tend to be poured concrete with slab breaks every thirty feet or so. Those seams make for a rather bumpy road, they are very small bumps but compared to an unbroken asphalt road are very bumpy.

Thus a brand new freeway could easily end up being downgraded compared to an older asphalt surfaced road.

Also speed affects how much a bump is felt. Ever heard a road described as a 4-40 road? It's a dirt road with heavy wash-boarding (lots of bumps in the road), you drive it at either 4 mph or 40+ mph. In between those two speeds the bumps are painful to drive, below 4 your are just creeping over the bumps so they are tolerable and above 40 you start skimming across them fast enough that the ride smooths out. I know a few such roads that most drives using a system as you describe would mark them as not too bad or even good quality, because everybody knows to take em fast. When they should be marked as poor quality because they are poor, and need to be graded smooth.

No, it could require a lot of user data before degrading a freeway.
It's exactly the same as road average speed.

I put the idea in uservoice:

http://waze.uservoice.com/forums/59223- ... about-road

There is a road in my commute that is fast and has some very bumpy segments that are bad for my car.
I intend mark these segments as dirt road (and that would be correct), but it's hard to identify them on the map.

If this data is only used to show in my track wich segments are the bad ones, that would already be useful.

I believe the data is worth collecting, and let figure the best way to use it.

Fmoliveira wrote:No, it could require a lot of user data before degrading a freeway.
It's exactly the same as road average speed.

If the potholes are so bad that the average speed is influenced - isn't that enough? With bad road quality it is to be expected that there is a wider variation in driving speeds - so in an indirect way there is statistical data collected already. The question remains what to do with that. Advise the Porschedriver to buy a Dodge? "Never test for a condition you do not know how to handle".

If you interrupt your freeways by stretches of dirt track you must expect some wild effects. From all that we know dirt tracks are not considered by the router when planning longer routes.

If these stretches with potholes are short sections of a long segment of freeway you may consider adding junctions before and after it. In general it is not a good practice to break a long segment into shorter ones, but here the short segments would be more sensitive to the differences in speeds than a very long segment with a short span of potholes in it.

(edit)
Oops, you do not mention it is a freeway. What I wrote above about freeways works similar for Major and Minor Highways. Roads and Primaries are a different story, they are used for shorter distances and *might* route around dirt tracks. We have a couple of Waze-colleagues in New Zealand and Australia that are more used to dirt tracks than I am, maybe they can explicate here?

Fmoliveira wrote:It was suggested for potholes. But I know in roads your phone would be shaking constantly. The accelerometer can be useful to give an overall quality rating for the entire segment.

Much more, it gives an overall quality rating of the entire segment, your shock absorbers, your tires and eventual earthquakes. Just imagine driving a bumpy road with a Dodge Ram and a Porsche 911. The Dodge will hardly feel anything at all, including young deer and children, while the Porsche is spilling all that Chardonnay from the cupholder...

All it would then require to degrade a freeway is two or three Waze users with wheel balancing that is slightly off to travel the same stretch of road for two or three days in a row....?

Typos courtesy of SlideIT. Posts courtesy of Tapatalk. The waffling is my own doing.