My biggest problem with Waze's routing isn't that it's at times complex, but that it sometimes wants me to do things that feel precarious. I've had occasions where it has me cross a super busy 4-lane street in the dark, at a spot that has no traffic light with everyone going high speeds in a slight curve. No thanks!
I actually decided to stop using Waze for that reason. It felt like its routing algorithm is way too aggressive and would take me on shortcuts through smaller streets, just to shave off a minute or two. This in turn would require being much more attentive, since you need to make a turn much more often. I absolutely hated it.
I wish route-finding apps (Google Maps, Waze, etc.) more heavily penalized left turns and aggressive/risky maneuvers in their route-costing algorithms, if they do at all.
Waze in particular is frustrating, as it aggressively routes you down side streets with the intent of saving you time, but following its route always seems to result in trying to turn left across two lanes of fast traffic (or pull straight through four lanes) with no traffic signal a minute or two later.
waze acts as if it treats all roads as wide, level, straight paths, and expects ppl to speed on them bc it sends me on twisty, steep, narrow 25mph roads with low visibility so they canxt be sped on.
I stopped using Waze last year after it started consistently giving me bad directions that would add 30-60 minutes to my commute. After a few weeks of that, I just gave up. Before that, it would periodically give me bad directions and I assumed that it was sending me on crazy routes because it didn't have any recent data and it needed a victim to check the traffic.
The time it sent me along a street with 2 school zones during bus time was the worst, tho.
Waze pointing out police and road hazards has saved my bacon a lot. Sometimes it routes me wrong, but sometimes I distrusted it's recommendation to go through a side street, only to slam into a huge traffic jam that it was routing me around.
Nowadays, I use Waze but look at the route, and if it is overcomplicated, I look to see if it did it for obvious reasons (traffic jams).
Apple Maps is pretty awful for me, it doesn't give enough detail on turns (like what lane to be in), and its POI database sucks. Too many times I've typed in the name of a place that's local and its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away. In non-US/European countries, like if you're driving in South America, don't even bother.
As a Waze user, this has actually been a source of increasing frustration for me.
I do not want to save 1-3 minutes on a commute by cutting through unfamiliar residential areas where deaf kids play and homeowners give me dirty looks as I go over their oversized speed bumps.
I use Waze not so much as a super-optimal routing tool, but as an aggravation-avoidance tool. Traffic and speed-traps aggravate me, sure... but not nearly so much as trying to make a blind left from a stop sign at the top of a hill in my manual transmission.
Just yesterday I was in a somewhat unfamiliar area during crazy rainstorms near NYC... I used Waze since who knows what traffic looks like in those conditions.
In order to avoid 20-30 seconds of waiting at a traffic light it routed me to the next street over to make the left turn... which was on a curve with lots of parked cars and, in that weather, made it impossible to see if anyone was coming. If it hadn't been a one-way street I'd have considered turning around and going back to the light... but instead I used my best judgement and BARELY avoided getting nailed by another car.
Waze is great technology, but is still pretty naive about solving the problem I want solved. All the aggregated minutes of driving it has saved me over the last couple years would not have been worth it if yesterday's single poor routing decision had ended with me in the hospital/dead and/or my car totaled.
Once upon a time, I was trying to cross from VA into MD via the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. The bridge was closed due to an accident. Waze happily directed off the highway and onto side streets, where it had me do circles in and out of parking lots and strip malls until I gave up and went home. It was really weird - literally couldn't go anywhere, so instead of telling me to stay put, it just ran me around in bumper-bumper traffic for 90 minutes.
In the DC area enough people have this kind of intelligent routing that Waze seldom saves me much time. And not all of it is intelligent, Waze-style routing; a lot of it is just that people know shortcuts. Even when it claims to have time savings at the beginning, usually it eliminates those time savings from its estimate as I actually drive.
Sometimes Waze gets a shortcut for me that actually saves maybe three or four minutes...but at the expense of driving down dangerous roads and making numerous turns. Typically it's not even worth it.
About the only time Waze is worth it is when there is an extraordinary event, such as a very bad wreck or a closed road. In those circumstances rerouting can save time.
At least Waze is up to date. Apple sometimes gives me impossible routes (e.g. illegal turns) and has some street and highway names that have been out-of-date for at least six months. Google on the other hand has an infuriating way of asking me to confirm reroutes that supposedly save me time, and giving me only a few seconds to do it. But Waze has a muddy, horrible interface. All these services have flaws.
I find Waze to be absolutely horrific at routing. Just this week, at the start of a route, it sent me into a wreck on a surface street it already knew was causing crawling speeds for over a mile. 13 minutes in traffic it should have avoided.
In the general sense, Wave greatly prefers higher average travel speeds over distance to the point of being comical. Going between my two most frequent destinations can be 34 miles on a bunch of super highways or 21 miles of surface street with a long stretch state highway that is mostly posted 55mph. The calculated ETAs are usually within 3 minutes of each other but Waze almost always wants me to travel the longer distance -- burning a bunch more gas and making the drive more stressful.
Then there's all the screwy stuff it does with side streets. Having to enter busy arterial roads from uncontrolled intersections is probably not saving me time and is certainly not making my travels safer or less stressful. Especially when it wants me to turn left.
Waze is a nice substitute for shuffling my Valentine One between vehicles.
I mostly agree. The biggest problems with Waze are when it puts a three mile detour to turn around, and that it struggles to find a whole host of places compared to Apple/Google. Particularly small out of the way places. It just doesn’t have the granularity of smaller back roads.
I quit using Waze for exactly that reason, after being a happy user for years. I wonder who thought it would be a great idea to have me make an unprotected left turn from a side street onto a major road with no signal at rush hour.
Another problem with Waze, by the way, is that the algorithm is designed to route you away from a busy intersection or a congested street without regard to whether or not going out of your way will take more time than just slogging through the street/intersection. Waze also likes to do stupid things like insisting you make a left onto a six-lane divided highway without a light.
And their pathing is just bad: it insists on cutting through a gated community to get to my place, something that's physically impossible. And even worse, the entrances to that gated community and my townhouse complex are on different arterials. It also doesn't recognize the entrance to my townhouse complex as a valid entrance too (if you try to enter via the entrance, Waze will shriek at you to turn around, get back on the arterial, and find the gated community). I've also seen it straight-up get lost before when trying to go to one bar that's near my office.
Because of this, I long ago decided that whenever I request a Lyft, and I'm going either to or from home, I will call the driver and say "My name is Amy, I requested a ride. I'm calling to confirm that you are not using Waze.", and I will hang up and cancel if they say they're using Waze, if they don't speak enough English to understand the question (I live in a pretty diverse city, so this is common), or if they demand why I'm asking and then start angrily grilling me about every detail related to my destination.
And, yes, the third scenario is sadly common. I have never seen people get angry in real life like Waze partisans do except where actual religion is involved... imagine the worst kinds of vim/emacs warriors, Linux/Mac/Windows fanboys, PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo/PC zealots, iPhone/Android partisans, etc., except in real life instead of on the Internet. It's actually why I started calling ahead: I used to just wait for the driver to get here, get in the car, and then as soon as they start the navigation and Waze comes up, I would calmly say "please don't use Waze, it can't get to where I'm going". The reaction was, more often than not, angry and aggressive. They treat "Waze can't get to where I'm going" as an attack on their lifestyle. After dealing with abusive drivers who will call me a liar to my face, screaming "that's the only thing I have!" at the top of their lungs, getting violent (I had one lady who punched her steering wheel while screaming the aforementioned), and sometimes getting straight-up kicking me out of the car (my response is always "Gladly!"), I've learned to call ahead and filter them out, as I have no desire to come within 10 feet of nasty, aggressive religious warriors. Oh, sure there have been plenty of Waze users who will let me navigate them manually (I can navigate from my office to my home in my sleep) or who will let me open Google Maps on my own phone and listen to the voice nav from there, but the number of angry fanboys and fangirls with no emotional maturity means that I'm not willing to risk it.
And it's because of the aggressive religious warriors who I'm afraid to share a vehicle with, and to a smaller degree because Waze's pathing sucks in general, I've started to call ahead to make sure they're not using Waze even when I'm not going to or from my house.
Waze has given me a lot of stupid advice in the last couple years. It will take me off a freeway, requiring many lane changes in heavy traffic, only to route me onto a clogged surface street and back onto the freeway after an exit or two. It usually fails to save me any time, and causes a lot of headaches. I stick with Google Maps now unless I need the police and hazard warnings(long road trips mostly).
I mostly like Waze and use it a lot. But its inability to determine which way to turn when exiting a parking lot at the start of a trip is consistent and baffling. Often as not it'll show the wrong direction, followed by a literal U-turn or more complex sequence amounting to the same thing. I resort to using the compass and/or taking the extra time to zoom out on the map and see if it's sane.
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