Waze forum

Unfortunately I am doing precisely the same thing as realc4ever. I use Waze as much as posisble. But when I hit a limitation (can't avoid a road or part of a route - or using it outside my home country) I have to pull my TomTom out of my glove compartment.

Most GPS apps have a "detour" or "avoid part of route" option. This is precisely what is needed in Waze as well...

Thanks.

DerekFrance wrote:I had to change the destination to somewhere else and then go back and change the destination back to Home to see the 3 routes. But all of the routes used the, temporarily closed, autoroute.

I also have found the alternative routes no use at times. I agree that a clever 'road closed' function would make the app more appealing to a lot of people.

+1 For 'Road blocked' and 'waypoint' functions.

Personally I don't think Waze will really be taken seriously without them. I love Waze but always have another satnav available for these contingencies.

Why? You ask. Because when you are driving, it's dangerous to be fiddling about trying to plan a route using the stop hack. A big 'road blocked' button that forces a sensible re-route is safer. If I'm on a freeway and the sign says it's blocked after next junction, I can't stop to re-route.

I've experienced this where Waze didn't see any other route besides the one that was closed. In my case, the alternate route would be 10+ miles out of the way and Waze isn't ever going to offer that as an alternate.

There was a button in one of the recent beta for "Road Closed" but it wasn't functional, and it's since been removed. Hopefully they're still working on it, and it's functionality will allow you to take a specific road out of the routing options due to a closure.

In the old Garmin, you only used the Detour button if the next leg of your route was unusable.

Of course, it didn't report that to anyone else. I'm not sure if this feature should do that in Waze either.

davipt wrote:It's the route I drive every single day for more than one year. There was a time the client may have been learning, but right now I'm pretty sure it's not learning anything. My guess is that it forgets everything on every mapdate, and having mapdates more frequently invalidates the learning and explains why it felt it was learning something when mapdates were taking more than one month.

It won't learn unless you drive the suggested route a few times and show Waze that it's not the fastest route.

What's the actual travel time difference between the two routes?

+1 for a (short term) road closed / avoid feature.

This morning, there was a major accident on a main trunk road on my way to work. A 10 mile stretch of dual-carriageway was closed by the police in both directions. There is no time for the police to put up detour signs. I got there just as the road was being closed. Meanwhile on Waze, there is no way to report that the road is closed, either to get Waze to re-route for yourself or to inform others (and you can't report the accident as you can't report incidents (or potentially road closures) not in your current exact location).

Luckily I know the local roads and knew where to go but for the first 3 miles of the detour, Waze was insisting I turn around and go back to the (closed) main road. If I didn't know the area, I'd be lost and blindly following traffic hoping they're going where I want to go.

Recently due to our bad weather, there have been a number of roads closed due to flooding or snow. Some are major roads, some minor. But if you come across one, maybe it's late in the evening, there are no diversion signs to follow, there's no traffic to follow, if you don't know the area you have to find somewhere to stop and examine the map and manually navigate as Waze just tries to send you back to the closed road. We need some way of not just reporting a closed road so Waze will warn you / re-route you before you even get close to the road, but also need to say how long it is for... no point reporting a road closed if your report will clear off Waze after only an hour, you might want to inform the system it will be there all morning, or the next 24 hours or maybe overnight roadworks...

I think Road Closures should be able to be added on the website. My idea would be for the Map Editor to have a new Road Closure tab or option where you can highlight road segments which are going to be closed, and set the local time of when the road will close and re-open. This information would get transmitted to the app separately from map tiles so it's available to Waze users ASAP.

For example, in my city a couple of weeks ago a whole 40km freeway was shut down so they could hold a cycling event. It would have been nice to go into the editor, highlight the whole freeway, set the closure times and for Waze to not route you onto that road. And the app should give you a warning when it detects a closed road, for example when that freeway is normally the fastest route, so you know why Waze won't route you down that freeway at a particular time.

I can't see this being implemented well in the app itself as you can't put a road closed icon on a road you can't drive on. Perhaps a "road closure in area" option in the app and you can type what the closure is.