Waze forum

[I posted this separate of the 3.6 feedback thread because I am unclear if it is a client or back-end routing issue.]

At the meetup last weekend bgodette and I noticed as we drove through this intersection it failed to provide a right turn instruction into the cloverleaf. This is a pretty common bowtie layout for these interchanges to prevent through traffic from getting off and on the freeway. These interchanges are common in California and I have been ensuring most of them have this bowtie restricted straight through route set up. They have been working fine for months.

We were not sure why the problem happened here, so we came up with the hidden stub turn from that junction that provides a choice forcing the routing engine or client to announce which of the active turns to make.

Today when I drove through this intersection, for the first time since I created this junction many months ago, I did not get the right turn instruction. I have gotten it every time I have gone through here until today.

Something has changed in either the routing engine or latest client. I am pretty sure this is the first time I have driven through here with the latest client. I am not sure if the editor has received any minor updates (prior to the beta release version going live). My assumption is this came from the latest client release or is a change in the routing engine (for which we have no visibility). I think this change breaks functionality in the client that used to work as desired and we should push it as a bug back to Waze rather than changing all the bowtie freeway intersections like bgodette and I did in Sunnyvale above.

My client is now giving a "Keep right to Montague Expy" instruction at that junction.

All I can say is that my client did not show the keep right instruction yesterday.

Neither, I just panned across the country. You don't need a GPS fix to route. You can set a start point and a destination with GPS off. There is nothing to stop you from downloading the tiles for Washington, DC.

kentsmith9 wrote:I have two concerns with that proposal:

1. It was working fine for months. We should not have to update every segment on the map to adapt to changes to the back end that we don't even know were intentional. Ehud also mentioned we should not try to work around things that appear broken because they are constantly making changes that may or may not stay.

I'm obviously not familiar with the particular intersection, but it to me that way things are working now seem logical and straight-forward. So the current way thing are working doesn't really appear broken to me.

kentsmith9 wrote:2. I am pretty sure that I found when you have unnamed segments, the turn by turn instructions on the client show "..." for those unnamed segments. I have personally experienced the problem and when trying to determine which route to take the turn by turn instructions left out major named turns, so I was not sure what route it was actually taking. After filling in all the segment names it worked fine.

On my client, the unnamed segments have no name in the navigation list as shown in the screen shot earlier in the thread. But the name of the next segment does show in the navigation bar and is spoken by the TTS when routing.

CBenson wrote:All I can say is that my client did not show the keep right instruction yesterday.

Are you out here in CA currently, or using a GPS location alteration app?

Oh. You are just looking at the turn-by-turn instruction on the client from a selected point. I do that all the time to check for alternate routes, but never thought about it for this.

This function is still broken in Milpitas where it was functioning fine for me for months.

I am still not clear if we post these newly found problems into our problem list, a particular forum, or to Support. In this case I am not sure if we know if this is a client or back end issue. I assume back end.

I have two concerns with that proposal:

1. It was working fine for months. We should not have to update every segment on the map to adapt to changes to the back end that we don't even know were intentional. Ehud also mentioned we should not try to work around things that appear broken because they are constantly making changes that may or may not stay.

2. I am pretty sure that I found when you have unnamed segments, the turn by turn instructions on the client show "..." for those unnamed segments. I have personally experienced the problem and when trying to determine which route to take the turn by turn instructions left out major named turns, so I was not sure what route it was actually taking. After filling in all the segment names it worked fine.

CBenson wrote:

kentsmith9 wrote:I have two concerns with that proposal:

1. It was working fine for months. We should not have to update every segment on the map to adapt to changes to the back end that we don't even know were intentional. Ehud also mentioned we should not try to work around things that appear broken because they are constantly making changes that may or may not stay.

I'm obviously not familiar with the particular intersection, but it to me that way things are working now seem logical and straight-forward. So the current way thing are working doesn't really appear broken to me.

Either way it was working differently in the past and now it changed. We have to change our mapping to support the back end change. In principal that to me is a problem unless it was changed on purpose and improves some other issue, but I guess we will not know from Waze. As it is we set up freeway intersections like this due to other routing issues taking people off the freeway to follow the ramps just to get back on. Now we have to make another change to all those intersections around here when this routing fails. Currently this intersection is not giving guidance for taking the ramp off the freeway vs on the freeway. If the only option is to remove ramp names, how do we know that will not break yet something else in the future? I will have to admit this is getting pretty frustrating changing perfectly operating parts of the map, and that is what I heard Ehud say we should not be doing.

CBenson wrote:

kentsmith9 wrote:2. I am pretty sure that I found when you have unnamed segments, the turn by turn instructions on the client show "..." for those unnamed segments. I have personally experienced the problem and when trying to determine which route to take the turn by turn instructions left out major named turns, so I was not sure what route it was actually taking. After filling in all the segment names it worked fine.

On my client, the unnamed segments have no name in the navigation list as shown in the screen shot earlier in the thread. But the name of the next segment does show in the navigation bar and is spoken by the TTS when routing.

I will have to take a closer look at some routes that have this "..." issue again. I am pretty sure during the meetup bgodette saw this same issue when we were driving to San Francisco through areas I have not yet fixed by naming segments necessary for guidance. I will study more when I return from my travels out of the US for the next few weeks.