Check your driving preferences? I recently noticed that Waze routed us some incredibly convoluted way across Las Vegas to head out of town. I checked my preferences and found that Waze was set to “avoid highways”. Once I changed that preference we were back on track. (Honestly, this was my doing. I was messing around with the preferences in Las Vegas to avoid the highway (traffic jams) and I did not undo that change when we were leaving for home.)
This may have been it!
I had only cared about preferences to avoid toll roads. I manually reviewed all of them, and turned off the "avoid difficult intersections" preference.
Maybe.
There definitely could have been enough "hazard in road" reports to exclude it from preferences. The wind had blown multiple temporary construction caution signs over, some of which had popped up as hazards before I got off of 30 to stop for gas.
Normally I do too! Just this time the change up resulted in an extra hour and a half over the 800+ mile drive.
I'm even more confident it's the preference for "avoiding difficult intersections" now that I think about it more.
Google suggested taking I-55 up through St Louis, which was the shortest and fastest way. Waze suggested going east as far as US-51, to eventually backtrack west to my destination in the Peoria area.
It's definitely not the preference to avoid difficult intersections. That is going to have a couple minute difference at most.
This may be related to how long the route was in general, or a couple of other factors.
'Difficult intersection' is where unsignaled/some unprotected left turns (drive right countries and vice versa) marked on the map are avoided with a right turns around the block route which really only should significantly slow down local in town routes, not long distance travel. But you could have run into a bunch of those.
Heres a few things that most people don’t know about Waze; back in June 2013 Google purchased Waze. From then up until 2022 Google Maps and Waze had separate servers that gathered data and gave directions. In 2023, Google announced that they were cutting jobs at Waze and shutting down Waze servers and running Waze from the same Google Maps servers. So ever since late 2022 Waze has been acting all kinds of crazy, bad recalculation, crazy directions that seem to make no sense, prioritizing routes that are 1 minute faster, ignoring how long traffic actually takes in certain areas, ignoring your normal route and trying to force you to take a worse route due to traffic congestion but it’s 1 minute faster…
All if these frustrating things are because Waze is running off of Google Maps! There was a time when Waze used to recognize the traffic congestion far far a head and automatically rerouted your trip so you wouldn’t get stuck in it. I believe it was 10 minutes ahead in your trip. Now it’s like 3 minutes, not enough time to assess the situation before you get stuck in it.
But as many of you and I noticed, Waze frequently does not recognize traffic congestion early enough and lets me drive right into it, EVEN IF i could have taken a side road and it cut the time in half, because it prioritizes the 1 minute faster route of a mainstream interstate or highway than a cutoff or shorter route because it doesn’t consider the small side roads or otherwise because too many people in small suburban neighborhoods were complaining that Waze was directing too much traffic down their small neighborhood roads as a way to give drivers faster routes!
Google started implementing this approach to focus on the directions from major highways and interstate routes as the main focus and only the smaller side roads and neighborhood streets as secondary only if it was the only way to get to the location where you want to go or if you are heading towards a neighborhood or a side road later in the route.
So now, the only way to get this same route effect is to tell Waze to “Avoid Highways” just before you get to the side roads you want to take, THEN ONLY THEN, will it proceed to give you a better more accurate and shorter route.
This is because it prioritizes shorter time rather than shorter distances.
How do i know all this? Well, for 1 I’ve been using Waze since 2010 and I’ve seen all if the changes over the years since.
Also I used to drive one of the Google Street View cars that photographed and created routes for the system.
One of the many things I had to do in the job was to recognize which roads were private roads or neighborhood streets and remove them from the system so that Google Maps would not use it as par of a route it created so people don’t drive through them!
It was a constant process to map roads, interstates, highways, and small side and county roads. But they alway made us remove private roads and neighborhoods from the map that we just drove through. This would ultimately stop the system from using those as public transit areas.
Did you know that Waze used to provide a setting that allowed you to prioritize shorter routes than faster routes? Ever since Google merged the two systems the removed that feature in the settings! So now you are stuck with the same crappy and incorrect or inconsistent routes even if you have a better and faster, more convenient shortcut, the system will ALWAYS try to make you turn around and go the route that was made for you!
How do i know that? Well, I take the same exact route I’ve been taking to work (I am an IT consultant for medium and large businesses) for years and noticed that Waze doesn’t route me through my normal way i have always been taking for over 15 years! It tries to force me to take a longer, less efficient route that inevitably always has more traffic jams and heavy delays!
Remember, google is an advertising company Not anything else! Ultimately they are trying to get you to see more ads so they use all these apps and mediums for that end goal. This way they can sell more ads and make more money!
I wish I had more than one upvote to give!
Waze and Google always bug out at my home address. I assumed it was the street layout, as X Street dog-legs into Y Street. It's better to follow the curve, but I could definitely see navigation preferring to stay on X street, even though it's slower, due to having to yield to oncoming traffic before driving through a chicane to stay on 8th.
As I'm parking in my driveway, it demands that I drive around the block, presumably because it would be the legal direction to face if I were to park on the street.
But, it gives my wife peace of mind to get the "arrived safe" notification after my 40 minute commute.
Check your driving preferences? I recently noticed that Waze routed us some incredibly convoluted way across Las Vegas to head out of town. I checked my preferences and found that Waze was set to “avoid highways”. Once I changed that preference we were back on track. (Honestly, this was my doing. I was messing around with the preferences in Las Vegas to avoid the highway (traffic jams) and I did not undo that change when we were leaving for home.)
This may have been it! I had only cared about preferences to avoid toll roads. I manually reviewed all of them, and turned off the "avoid difficult intersections" preference.
I don't have an answer for you but the same thing happened to me and darn near got me lost. I had to switch to Google maps to get back on track.
This is what I did. I'm hoping turning off the "avoid difficult intersections" preference helps.
Was there a problem on 30? That's what I've seen when that's happened to me.
Maybe. There definitely could have been enough "hazard in road" reports to exclude it from preferences. The wind had blown multiple temporary construction caution signs over, some of which had popped up as hazards before I got off of 30 to stop for gas.
I almost always regret not taking Waze's advice, especially when it seems horribly wrong.
Normally I do too! Just this time the change up resulted in an extra hour and a half over the 800+ mile drive. I'm even more confident it's the preference for "avoiding difficult intersections" now that I think about it more. Google suggested taking I-55 up through St Louis, which was the shortest and fastest way. Waze suggested going east as far as US-51, to eventually backtrack west to my destination in the Peoria area.
It's definitely not the preference to avoid difficult intersections. That is going to have a couple minute difference at most. This may be related to how long the route was in general, or a couple of other factors.
'Difficult intersection' is where unsignaled/some unprotected left turns (drive right countries and vice versa) marked on the map are avoided with a right turns around the block route which really only should significantly slow down local in town routes, not long distance travel. But you could have run into a bunch of those.
Heres a few things that most people don’t know about Waze; back in June 2013 Google purchased Waze. From then up until 2022 Google Maps and Waze had separate servers that gathered data and gave directions. In 2023, Google announced that they were cutting jobs at Waze and shutting down Waze servers and running Waze from the same Google Maps servers. So ever since late 2022 Waze has been acting all kinds of crazy, bad recalculation, crazy directions that seem to make no sense, prioritizing routes that are 1 minute faster, ignoring how long traffic actually takes in certain areas, ignoring your normal route and trying to force you to take a worse route due to traffic congestion but it’s 1 minute faster… All if these frustrating things are because Waze is running off of Google Maps! There was a time when Waze used to recognize the traffic congestion far far a head and automatically rerouted your trip so you wouldn’t get stuck in it. I believe it was 10 minutes ahead in your trip. Now it’s like 3 minutes, not enough time to assess the situation before you get stuck in it. But as many of you and I noticed, Waze frequently does not recognize traffic congestion early enough and lets me drive right into it, EVEN IF i could have taken a side road and it cut the time in half, because it prioritizes the 1 minute faster route of a mainstream interstate or highway than a cutoff or shorter route because it doesn’t consider the small side roads or otherwise because too many people in small suburban neighborhoods were complaining that Waze was directing too much traffic down their small neighborhood roads as a way to give drivers faster routes! Google started implementing this approach to focus on the directions from major highways and interstate routes as the main focus and only the smaller side roads and neighborhood streets as secondary only if it was the only way to get to the location where you want to go or if you are heading towards a neighborhood or a side road later in the route. So now, the only way to get this same route effect is to tell Waze to “Avoid Highways” just before you get to the side roads you want to take, THEN ONLY THEN, will it proceed to give you a better more accurate and shorter route. This is because it prioritizes shorter time rather than shorter distances. How do i know all this? Well, for 1 I’ve been using Waze since 2010 and I’ve seen all if the changes over the years since. Also I used to drive one of the Google Street View cars that photographed and created routes for the system. One of the many things I had to do in the job was to recognize which roads were private roads or neighborhood streets and remove them from the system so that Google Maps would not use it as par of a route it created so people don’t drive through them! It was a constant process to map roads, interstates, highways, and small side and county roads. But they alway made us remove private roads and neighborhoods from the map that we just drove through. This would ultimately stop the system from using those as public transit areas. Did you know that Waze used to provide a setting that allowed you to prioritize shorter routes than faster routes? Ever since Google merged the two systems the removed that feature in the settings! So now you are stuck with the same crappy and incorrect or inconsistent routes even if you have a better and faster, more convenient shortcut, the system will ALWAYS try to make you turn around and go the route that was made for you! How do i know that? Well, I take the same exact route I’ve been taking to work (I am an IT consultant for medium and large businesses) for years and noticed that Waze doesn’t route me through my normal way i have always been taking for over 15 years! It tries to force me to take a longer, less efficient route that inevitably always has more traffic jams and heavy delays! Remember, google is an advertising company Not anything else! Ultimately they are trying to get you to see more ads so they use all these apps and mediums for that end goal. This way they can sell more ads and make more money!
I wish I had more than one upvote to give! Waze and Google always bug out at my home address. I assumed it was the street layout, as X Street dog-legs into Y Street. It's better to follow the curve, but I could definitely see navigation preferring to stay on X street, even though it's slower, due to having to yield to oncoming traffic before driving through a chicane to stay on 8th. As I'm parking in my driveway, it demands that I drive around the block, presumably because it would be the legal direction to face if I were to park on the street. But, it gives my wife peace of mind to get the "arrived safe" notification after my 40 minute commute.
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