foxitrot wrote:My off-topic thought:

Ericular wrote:... how can we get there? How can Waze improve to appeal to more drivers? Are we lacking more in road & turn accuracy, or lack of real-time data and road reports?

Since my beginning with Waze, my opinion was always that Waze will never be able to make a real breakthrough, until the client will be able to calculate a decent route in offline mode, off course including the knowledge of such trivialities like house numbers and POIs. While being a useful and appealing navi, it could convince high percentage of its users or testers to make use of its wonderful online features. Otherwise, it will possibly never spread itself out of the most populated metropolitan areas.

Wait, what? I find this to be patently false in my own experience, and in fact I would say that Waze is ALREADY becoming useful - and used - in rural areas. Here's what I find.

1. I find some URs (usually using something like LMUR that lets me zoom way the heck out), showing that someone is attempting to use Waze in a rural area.
2. I fix their problems, and try to make the surrounding area navigable, recognizing that they're trying to use it.
3. I spread outward, fixing some of the larger highways and the general area. At that point, let's say that 10-20 miles from that area, you can get from basic place to place.
4. Suddenly...there are Wazers out there after a few months. There aren't a LOT, and maybe they throw a UR out there once every two months or even longer - the only real evidence that they're using those improvements, but why should there be more? For every 100 Wazers in Chicago, there might be ten, if one is lucky, in Grand Island, Nebraska, and one in Gleason, Wisconsin - if the map works there. None of this reduces the utility of fixing the map in that smaller place.

The best way to make Waze usable in rural areas is to fix the problems there. And I can tell you for certain, I've DONE that in say, Northern California. The first few rows, 1A through 9D on this map? http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tsip/hseb/crs_maps/

I've done this, among other things:
Classified all roads in that area by functional class
Done basic short naming conventions and verification of directionals, split roads, etc, according to California's naming standard.
Identified and created cities where they did not exist in the basemap
Created missing segments in classified roads (and there were an awful lot of them) - a missing segment in a road means noone will ever be routed onto it!

(I do agree that Waze DOES need to allow GPS coordinate navigation to be cached when a user's phone network is offline, absolutely. We miss a lot of speed data because that doesn't work properly, but that's a different issue. At that point, if we have a completely workable rural map and Waze doesn't work because of mobile network signal gaps, that can be brought to Waze to say 'Okay, it's really REALLY time to fix this now.' And...we're kinda there.)

The point scheme needs to be overhauled and split between editing and driving in my opinion and changed so it's just rank or level.

The vast majority of Wazers are casual Wazers, A small subset of the Waze community are "power users", known as whales in the social media world. The whales typically keep a social media company afloat (no pun intended). For example, It's commonly believed that Facebook and Zynga get 70% of their revenue from only 2% of their active user base.

Facebook, Zynga and other social media companies go through great pains to coddle their whales with special gatherings that are only available to them, fast tracks on "insider knowledge", extra perks and abilities that nobody else can have. Compare this to what Waze does and you will see the parallels right down the line.

The difference though, is that most social media companies like to hide this dirty little secret and who the whales are. Instead of points, you have "badges" and extra things such as different avatars, buildings etc. The illusion is kept that anybody will be able to get these, so that the casual user keeps interested and pursuing something they will most likely never get.

The whales are visible if you look, but most casual users don't piece it together and see the proverbial "man behind the curtain" pulling the strings. Waze's current point system however lays that all bare for all to see. You know exactly who the whales are and how far you will need to go to get there. Unfortunately, this ends up discouraging casual and new users in the long run. You need to keep a steady churn of new users so that the occasional whale will surface (pun intended) to add to your revenue stream.

If Facebook purchases Waze, I expect that the point system will get revamped with a lot more "special badges" and "special moods", etc. and most likely more obscurity as to who is a whale and who is not.

jasonh300 wrote:

sahls72 wrote:It would have saved me from an editor, with a sick sense of humor, that tried to route me through nothing but gas station parking lots and alleys. Of course I understand how difficult it would be to implement a system like this while keeping vandalism under control.

This sort of thing should be reported to your Regional Coordinator immediately with a permalink. Vandalism of the map is taken very seriously.

Check out western CO, and southern parts of WY. I think most of western CO may have been remedied (by doing a ground scorching level 5 lockdown of everything in some towns), but there were still a few "areas of question" last time I looked.

EDIT: Hmmm...After doing a recheck, it looks like you were involved in the ground scorch of Grand Junction, CO and surrounding environs so you have seen the persistent vandalism that occurs in less monitored areas.

Dave2084 wrote:I wish Waze had a tool where I could find all MY URs

If you get into the habit of tagging your URs with your username or some other unique bit of text, you could at least use the keyword filter in LMUR to fairly quickly scan across the country and find all your open URs. It's not an ideal solution I grant you, and I too would love it if the UR data contained some way to reliably determine if the UR is one of yours or not - wouldn't need to be a user ID with all the potential privacy implications Waze are so concerned about, just a simple "submittedByMe" boolean flag would suffice - but until that happens it's about the best we've got.

Dave2084 wrote:I think this shows that points wise WME rewards editors more than Cartouche did, but that incentive is to make the maps better and having been here since the pre basemap days where we had a blank map it certainly needed it.

Coming back onto topic, I'm personally not that bothered about how many points I do or don't earn from editing, so I don't think I'd actually care one bit if the only way to earn points was by driving. What I DO care about as an editor is the number of edits I've got, because that's what's important when it comes to determining editor levels and thus how effective you can be as an editor. Not too happy about the recent increase in edits required for L5 status - I'm now further away from becoming a L5 than I was when I got my L4 promotion despite several months of editing since then

Dave2084 wrote:Going slightly off topic, it's sad that new users (in the base-mapped countries at least) will never experience the thrill of spending all day paving roads and then a few days later munching miles of cookies on the same roads, that's what got me hooked!

Quite. Even a year and a big ago when I started, SE England still had enough unmapped or mapped but yet to be driven roads to make finding one not too difficult, whereas these days the only paving action to be had is on new build estates (and having now driven around a few of those this past year, I'm bloody pleased I don't have to drive in and out of one every day - narrow twisty access roads, blind corners/junctions, barely enough space to get past cars parked in the few allocated spaces...) and even the cul-de-sacs that always used to be the last preserve of pacman action have mostly been nibbled away leaving barely anything to do.