Wrong routing when using stops

[sketch]

Here's an example where it gets it totally and blatantly wrong:



The endpoint is a house at the right edge of the screen. The via point is the airport in the top left.

The route to the airport should have taken me straight down the interstate to the airport.

Instead, the route took me off the interstate, down Causeway, up W Esplanade, back up Clearview, and back to the interstate. That's 10 extra minutes, for no reason whatsoever.

I've highlighted the incorrect route in green, and the correct route in yellow.

I've seen some pretty bad via-point routing, but this is a particularly egregious example.

As far as I can see Waze loves its routes. So much it will only calculate the shortest possible deviation from the original route when adding a stop. When you pick your destination a calculation happens and the resulting route is the one used for the trip. Adding a stop will not cause a recalculation for the entire trip.

When a stop is far off your route it is more efficient to set the stop as your destination and the set the new destination when you arrive at your stop.

I've seen that, to an extent, but Waze is far more forgiving when a stop point is not set. We'd be better off if the two routes should be calculated separately and then added together.

[strandloper]

Referring to the map below.

If I leave point A and select point B (where I drop my son at work) as the destination, the route suggested is the green one with minor variations for traffic.

However if I set point C (where I work) as the destination and point B as a stop, the suggested route is the red one, followed by either the blue or purple one depending on traffic.

The red route is several kilometres longer than the green one and takes five or more minutes longer to drive. It should therefore never be suggested as the best route between A and B, whether B is set as the final destination or as a stop.

It would appear that when choosing a destination with a stop the route calculation is not done as best route to the stop then best route to the destination but as the best route to the destination with a deviation to the stop, which may not provide the best routing at all.

waze_stop_bug.gif (234.55 KiB) Viewed 1236 times

[strandloper]

Here are permalinks for the variously coloured routes on the map above.

• Green Route
• Red Route
• Blue Route
• Purple Route

[strandloper]

Thanks for the feedback guys. For now I'm just going to stop using the "Add a stop" feature; I'll just choose the stop as my destination then start a new route from there to my final destination. A minor inconvenience.

It would be interesting to know why I'm getting the strange routing though.

[strandloper]

That could be it. I was using the same destination and stop before going on leave over Christmas and it worked fine. It's only since I've been back at work (since 7 January) that I've been seeing this behaviour.

[strandloper]

Last week I was trying to route directly to the stop first then the final destination. It would start off suggesting the green route except that it wanted me to turn right from the N2 into Lourens (a block before Victoria), over the river, left into Sargeant then right into Victoria. As there are no lights at N2 & Lourens turning right across traffic there is often slower than turning right from the N2 into Victoria. Experience has also shown that there can be quite a hold-up turning right into Victoria from Sargeant so I tend to ignore this unless there is no other turning traffic ahead of me as I approach Lourens.

As soon as I pass Lourens, ignoring the suggested turn, Waze recalculates and switches to the red route and the ETA increases by four or five minutes. Once I ignore this and turn right into Victoria it switches to the green route again.

Assuming perfect traffic flow the green route is definitely better but as I found the other morning there was a hold-up on Victoria that lost me five minutes, so on that day the red route might have been faster. However there is just as much chance of delays on Broadway leading to the Lord Charles intersection so there is really no way to know which route will be better on any given day.

As you say there is probably just not enough traffic data for Waze to be totally accurate with routing in the area.

[TonyG-UK]

See this thread.

Routing servers have been giving bad routes for a couple of weeks now (especially for stops). I get a bad route every morning for my commute at the moment.

So there is probably nothing wrong with the map.