That’s what it says, but I’ve taken the same route to work every day and it’s yet to figure that out. It’s been several months, and it still insists I take a circuitous route through parks and neighborhoods to save me like 2 minutes.
And, for me, it has a strange obsession with the B/W Parkway. I never take the B/W Parkway, in fact I specifically avoid the B/W Parkway, and yet anytime I want to go pretty much anywhere, all three routes it suggests involve getting on the damn B/W Parkway, even when the destination is nowhere near the B/W Parkway. WTF Waze?!
I’ve been using it for something like 8-9 months, and the primary way you’re supposed to report stuff while driving is through the voice commands, where you wave at it, and say something like “REPORT. HAZARD. ON ROAD.”, and it’ll log the hazard and type where you first said “REPORT”.
And the routing is interesting. It really does seem to try and keep you on the main roads, and it also has an interesting property of often making you wade through traffic, because the direct route through the heavy traffic is still often faster than some fast-moving wide loop that avoids it.
Occasionally though, if there’s heavy traffic at a particular intersection, it’ll route you down lesser (i.e. slower) streets to get around it. This does often go through residential neighborhoods, but not usually any further than to get around the traffic jam.
It’s not really any different than what people who are personally familiar with the area would do on their own, except that the app will route you without you having to know the back streets personally.
My suspicion is that the people griping about it are people who live very near a major intersection that gets congested, and whose streets are the best bypass route to avoid it.
Ultimately, I don’t have any sympathy. I don’t want to wait through a traffic jam for an extra 20 minutes, just because some whiny homeowner doesn’t want to have traffic on their public, city-maintained street.
That’s been my experience as well. I have a way that I like to go, but it keeps sending me a slightly different way. I’ve been ignoring it at this point in the route every day for months, and it hasn’t learned that I don’t want to go that way; there is a school there and at the time that I’m going there are a lot of parents double parking and blocking traffic. I don’t expect Waze to know this, but this claimed learning behavior by the app doesn’t appear to be materializing.
All in all though, I think it saves me lots of time.
I also use it in Atlanta, and it works well for me. I’ve been routed local-ish, meaning roads I wouldn’t otherwise have used, but not really into residential streets.
But I generally only use it when I have to go somewhere out of my normal area so I don’t know the shortcuts around traffic like I do around where I live. (Or if I get caught in stupid construction traffic, as happened last week. Good thing I’d planned extra time to go that 5 miles because I got there right on time.)
I’ve tried using it twice, and could only stand it for a day or so each time- because it doesn’t give turn warnings soon enough. I use my phone for GPS while I’m on my motorcycle- I keep it in my pocket and listen to it over bluetooth, so I can’t see the screen. And quite often it would tell me to turn… at that street I just passed. And there’s no setting to change the warning time.
The DH and I both use it. We rely on it. Bay Area traffic sucks. One nice thing it does is share drives. So I can see where he is (or vice verse) for timing dinner, or coordinating meet ups.
Does Google maps use Waze info to report traffic? I use that everyday to see if the turnpike I use to get home is moving. It seems accurate, but it’s not like when the turnpike is shown in red I go there to verify, so whatever.
Google Maps does use Waze traffic info to report accidents and such. That’s actually how I found it- I saw an accident in Google Maps that said “reported by Waze app”, and figured I’d look up the Waze app.
As for things being in the wrong places, etc… that’s because the maps are more or less crowdsourced. Loach you can go edit your cul-de-sac to more properly reflect where your house is if you so desire. Usually this is good, but in my case, it sometimes is at the mercy of less than competent editors, and routes end up funky as a result of inexpert editing and the subsequent routing by the application.
I deleted Waze from my phone. I didn’t particularly like the interface and it once routed me around a traffic jam by sending me down a long side street that eventually dead ended at a river. Had to turn around and retrace my steps and join the same traffic jam I had left 20 minutes before. In fairness, that was before Google stepped in (I use Google maps), so I may check it out again.
I’ve been using it for a couple years. I generally like it- especially that it gives me a few different options with estimated drive times. I have never actually contributed to the crowdsourcing by reporting anything, however, as I figure I’ll be contributing to the reported hazards by interacting with my phone to file a report.
I’ve tried to second-guess it a few times, thinking “that can’t be right- this way is always shorter than that way”, only to discover that I was wrong.
As someone who typically logs more than 20k miles a year, I’ve put Waze through its paces, and it has proven useful in many occasions. Daily commutes differ on a case-by-case basis, and mine is rather mundane.
The single most useful experience I have using Waze is during long road trips around the holidays. You can turn your driving experience into a pilot/navigator approach where someone looks for approaching problems while the other focuses on the road. Generally Waze is best used in combination with Google Maps since they both pull from the same traffic data and Maps is easier to read.
Add in GasBuddy (for finding the best cities to stop by price) and you have three tools to make those long trips more frugal.
The Police alert is also a welcome notification for when you’re ‘making good time’
I use it, because it really is helpful to be routed around heavy traffic or accidents in real time. But I have three big gripes about it:
As mentioned upthread by TSBG, in the course of “helping” you avoid heavy traffic by taking side streets, it sometimes directs you into a situation where you have to make a left turn from a side street onto a backed-up main street, at an intersection where there’s no light. So you’re sitting there at a stop sign, without a prayer of anyone in the virtual standstill on the main street letting you in.
When you first start it up, it asks you if you’re on you’re way home, and if you don’t hit “no” within 15 seconds, it automatically starts navigating you there. Ordinarily I don’t mind hitting “no,” but sometimes it’s asked me about home at the same time as I’m entering my real, non-home destination, and even though it looks like I hit “go” to my real destination and think it’s navigating me there, I find, once I start getting near home, that it’s actually been directing me home the whole time.
Unlike Google Maps, it doesn’t do a good job of recognizing when your’e not on a road. If you’re in a big shopping center or office building parking lot, it usually still places you on the main road and starts navigation accordingly. But because it doesn’t show you driving toward the road as you cut through the parking lot, you can’t tell where on the map you are and which direction on the road it thinks you’re going, leading you to sometimes turn the wrong direction when you actually hit the road.
Mine does not do that, and I have my location set for Home.
It does appear to remember all of the places I’ve told it to go. The list just keeps getting longer and longer, and I’ve not seen any locations drop off yet.
I do like the setting where it syncs with your Google Calendar, so if you have things scheduled on your calendar with locations, it will “read” that and ask, if you turn it on near that time, if you’re headed to [wherever] and navigate you there. It was freaky the first time it happened because I didn’t realize it did that, then later I figured it out.
Am I the only one who finds this to be a giant battery suck? The app is always running in the background. In location services there are only two options, always on and always off. So even when you don’t have the app on it is tracking your location. Not only does that seem weird and unnecessary to me, it is draining my battery much faster.
Also the brooklyn assasin was using waze to try and find cops to kill. So I got that going for me.
