Vince, thank you for moving this here.

Looking into the route, it changes throughout the day, probably as traffic picks up. From what it looks like, Waze should give you your preferred route at 8, noon, and from 4-5:30 PM. As Vince mentioned, it looks like everything is mapped correctly, so we won't be of much help, but you can manually pick your route when you first start (or during your commute). Another option would be to drive both your preferred route and the initial Waze given route to help Waze get the data it needs to better calculate the route times.

Thanks for the quick response.
Sample Starting point: 4000 Reedy Creek Rd, Raleigh, NC 27607
Sample Destination: 1052 Milk Paint Alley, Apex, NC 27502
Suggested route takes Exit 95 off of US 1S.
Better route takes Exit 93b off of US 1S.
Note that "better" route includes a short leg on a toll road (NC540). However, I have "Avoid toll roads" turned off.
Thanks

Thanks. For what it's worth, almost every weekday my travel time for this route is between 4 and 5:30PM. I've probably driven this route with Waze enabled 50+ times in the last year. I'll try to remember to run Waze consistently on this trip for the next few months to see if that changes things.
BTW - Google maps always shows my "preferred" route between those two destinations.

Thanks again for your insights on this. Waze is a great program even if it doesn't always behave the way *I* think it should.

Preferred routes never existed, it has become a common belief because of some misunderstood advertisement from Waze, which used that wording to describe the fact that Waze will remember your frequent destinations and suggest them to you when you open the app.
So Waze doesn't learn routes, it learns where you usually go to from somewhere at a certain time of day, in order to auto-suggest the destination for routing with a pop-up. The route to go there will however always be based on your setting (shortest/fastest) and current traffic conditions.

Regarding your main problem, please let us know where that is located, it is hard to know what could be causing this without seeing how the area in question is mapped. Ideally without giving us exact adresses here in the forum, let us know general start + end locations close to your actual ones that we can use to try to reproduce the routing and test it.

Thanks, I moved this to the North Carolina forum.

Here is a quick link to the 3 route options given by Waze:
https://www.waze.com/livemap?zoom=17&la ... t_text=Now

From what I can see there is no issue with the mapping, so it's only a matter of what Waze picks as the fastest route.
Apparently taking 93b adds 1.93 mile at the end (for your approximate location), since avoid toll is turned off on your device I suppose that could be the reason.

What you can do is to tap on the ETA at the bottom after you press Go to navigate, open the menu, then hit "Routes" and you should be able to choose the itinerary you prefer.

I realize that's not a perfect solution, I have the same problem but only when going back form work. It always wants to make me take a route I don't like which has about the same distance and ETA, I have been manually changing the route in that menu since 2013. Occasionally traffic will make my preference better and I won't have to..
I got used to it and I suppose as long as math says that the route we don't like is a better choice for ETA, it will be hard to convince the machine otherwise. While Waze is a "smart" app, it's still only programmed to do what it was asked to do with same treatment for all and can't read minds or take into account too many personal preferences yet.

But at least you are given the choice between the various itineraries in the ETA menu so you can see the ETA difference before having to decide which exit to take. You can also click that menu at any time during your trip (preferably when it's safe) to be given different options again based on your current location for your destination and compare ETAs.