Oh my is that obnoxious. I'm a daily Waze user, personally, and I find this to be the stupidest dialog the app produces. It pops up every few times you end up stopped at a light -- the moment I want to look at the app to check the route it's sent me on -- and there's a dialog covering up half the screen with no obvious "go away" button (is there one? Can I swipe it away? Who knows? I'm driving and don't have time to figure that out!). And I'm like you ... who on earth is clicking these ads on purpose. I could see if I put in a 6-hour route for a road trip -- maybe I hadn't thought of where I'd eat lunch -- but on my drive home from work, am I really using a navigation app and not caring about getting home?
I find the more fool-proof way to avoid being pulled over for speeding is to not speed in the first place, at which point both Google Maps and Apple Maps both report any other type of traffic slowdown just as good as Waze without the annoying advertisements.
For you, whose speeding fines are $0, ninety percent of zero seems like a small number. But for someone who spends >$0 on speeding it is worth some money.
Spoiler it is ‘not speeding’.
I recently bought a car with cruise control (the keep-this-speed kind). It was one of the only ‘extra’ options I was interested in at all and it has been great. I know most cars have this nowadays, but I came from a car without it. I was constantly watching my speed, even though I practically never go over the speed limit I semi-subconsciously checked my speed all the time, always busy with adjusting speed, especially in the city. Now with my cruise control I just set it and forget it. It is so relaxing. On the highway it is even better. Now I can just enjoy the drive without worrying about getting speed tickets and I can focus on the road better in order to prevent me from killing anyone. I am not sure the people playing with waze’s Ads in order to be able to speed can say the same.
Again, I do hear these conversations quite often but it never gets easier to hear someone talking so casually in a public forum about how little they care about being caught repeatedly breaking the law and endangering the lives of everyone else around them. I'm glad Waze has built a tool to enable that behavior.
Combine that with enforcement that is for the most part capricious and arbitrary, and I think it’s straightforward to understand how we’ve gotten to this point.
It's not "criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists", those 15% of motorist choose to break the law and endanger everyone else. They're not genetically predisposed to one certain speed, they choose to go faster. And with any choice, it comes with a consequence.
But go ahead, say whatever makes you feel better about yourself. Hopefully the cop understands that your free flowing otherwise law-abiding speed is just poorly optimized. Hopefully the pedestrians you hit understand that their safety is just capricious and arbitrary. Hopefully the family of the victims understand you're just being unfairly criminalized.
Or you can just drive the speed that the entire rest of society has all agreed to drive. That's how civilization works.
No, it doesn't, for several reasons, most notably:
(1) percentiles don't work that way; particularly, if everyone who would drive at or faster than the limit in its absence drove exactly at the limit in its presence, it would have no effect on the 85th percentile speed, so setting and maintaining an 85th percentile limit doesn't require any violations of the limit to occur,
(2) simple speed limit violations often are not criminal in and of themselves, so even if 15% were driving over the limit, they wouldn't be criminals.
The highway speed limit may be 70mph, say, but from an emissions point of view, for most cars the ideal speed is more like 60mph.
From a safety point of view, the ideal speed will depend largely on traffic conditions. 85mph might be fine in light traffic on a straight road in clear weather in daylight, less so in other conditions. That seems like a good argument for lowballing the speed limit (assuming that you're correct about that).
I’m was just explaining to my OP the expected utility of Waze. Yes, I’m cavalier about talking about that. I don’t understand why I need to be alarmist about it for you to feel safe in this conversation.
Yes, it's fool-proof to simply "not speed" and I have Waze set up to give me speed warnings so that I avoid speeding by accident. The fact of the matter is, traffic laws are the kinds of laws that are easy to break by accident. Getting a little extra warning to pay attention, both in having a speed warning and an enforcement warning, is helpful in avoiding a costly mistake. And there are times when speeding is the safer choice. In Michigan, interstates are almost all 70 MPH (with, I'm told, some going to 80 MPH). Around cities, where acceleration/deceleration ramps are too short and for a variety of other reasons related to the design of the freeways, the speed limits are set at 55 MPH. Everyone continues to travel at 70 MPH. Aside from the concept that keeping at the same speed of traffic reduces the speed at which you are hit in an accident (70 MPH, 75 MPH collision is 5 MPH at initial impact plus whatever happens after that), the bigger problem is the aggressive drivers, many of which are simply going the expected 70 MPH (some, probably without realizing the speed limit dropped) who will jump out of your lane, cutting off the driver in the adjacent lane, then jump back in front of you, similarly failing to leave a safe distance. This lane-jumping causes at least three different opportunities for a wreck should every driver involved not be paying appropriate attention.
About a decade ago, I watched exactly how this can turn into an incredibly dangerous situation. The slow car was in the right-most lane, traveling at 55 MPH on I-94. The road had moderate traffic and the van approached the smaller car at around ... probably ... 75-80 MPH. He had a sedan behind him pretty close traveling at the same speed. The van didn't want to slow down but there was a car in the middle lane, so he accelerated and managed to get in front of a car in the middle lane by getting maybe a foot off of the bumper of the slow car and rapidly changing lanes. The car behind the van wasn't so lucky. I'm guessing he was fiddling with the radio or phone, because he didn't react fast enough (though I'm not sure if he had reacted fast enough that the accident would have been avoided). He slammed on his brakes while simultaneously attempting to dodge the smaller car by moving to the left, hitting the car that was nearly blocking the van and the small car in front of him. By the time it was over, there was a rollover (the car behind the sedan who had chosen to swerve right -- onto the shoulder -- and swerved too hard), the middle lane car was totaled and several cars were rear-ended. Luckily, nobody died (as far as I know) but a few were taken off in ambulances. The slow car had the sedan nearly in its back-seat (I'm guessing he did the instinctual thing and slammed on the brakes when he got hit, making the damage worse). I was in the left-most lane and narrowly avoided both hitting the guy in front of me and being hit from behind. We all had a helluva morning giving statements to the police.
The best advice my dad gave me when I was 15 years old and learning to drive was "accidents are caused when you do something that other drivers aren't expecting." On the freeway, other drivers are expecting that every car is traveling very near the speed of everyone else. When you're the car who is not, you're "the unexpected". The good news is, according to anecdotal accounts I have from family members who are cops, the police understand this, too, and will generally not just pick a car out of the mass of vehicles going too fast. They're specifically looking for the guy who's jumping lanes or going at a much higher rate of speed than the rest of traffic.
Incidentally, the one thing you can count on when there is a cop monitoring one of those 55 MPH areas is that right near that cop, there's going to be a lot of sudden braking. Getting an audible warning of that a half-mile before it happens -- avoiding a possible fender-bender -- is really helpful.
[0] And it wasn't just Ohio, I-75, I-275 in Michigan as well as I-94 leading all the way up to Canada were similarly crazy.
Though I know all the roads around here (Bay Area) I still need google maps to find out which one is least congested.
That's not to say that whatever Waze is doing is a good idea, but that may well be the underlying mechanism for why they're trying.
I've been looking for a way to articulate this problem in A/B testing, thanks.
That's what I call a "better horse paradox".
Can I ask why? Having driven in both the US and europe and used GMaps in both places, I've found the lane guidance to be borderline useless. For the most part, lanes are intuitive (turning right - right lane), and when they're not, Google often gets them wrong.
And unless you've been here before and made the mistake (and got beeped at in the process) you probably won't know nor see the arrows as you're following the car in front of you.
I find it very useful (when it works)
Happened to me more than a few times, and the only way you can avoid it is if you know all the local roads, or if your navigation software knows it...
In my area, they finally started putting these in where we used to have four-way stops and the traffic flow is much better. However, people in the states are utterly baffled by them since we don't encounter them regularly. So there's usually a sign almost a half-mile back explaining what lane you need to be in depending on where you're trying to get ... and then another two signs, along with painting on the street, to tell you again as you approach.
However for pant wetting excitement in your car, I also recommend la Place du Concorde in Paris when its busy (its always busy). Its not a roundabout as such, more a loose agreement.
Are these common?
This is so confusing I had to view it from top down perspective and I still have no clue how you would navigate through this.
It looks like a vehicle approaching the Magic Roundabout via A4312 can use the outer ring to exit via B4289 or Fleming Way but any other exit the vehicle must spin in circles to enter the inner ring. I give up.
The centre (which doesn't really show up on Goog maps) goes anti-clockwise, bear in mind that we drive on the left and go clockwise around a roundabout usually. You can use the outside to avoid the centre completely, which is often faster. The main problem is that it is very heavily used and hence some of the markings are scrubbed out. Also it is easy to get disorientated but even if you fly out of the wrong exit, it is easy to use a side street later to get back on track.
I have to say that I would not recommend visiting Swindon to someone who usually drives on the right hand side. To be fair I don't really recommend Swindon to anyone 8) For me, the MR is the exciting end to a two hour drive to visit a customer - just what you need to wake you up at ~0930.
That about rounds it up, I would say!
I am aware that European roads as a whole are rather straightforwards compared to some parts (OK most) of the world. For starters we have rules and most of the time they are nearly obeyed. However the rules are often not quite the safe as the official ones.
For example, I discovered that around Napoli, you use your entire car as an indicator. Once you wedge it into a tiny gap then people will generally give way but you have to be very quick and accurate. It may be coincidental that when me and wifey started observing properly, that we estimated that around 90-95% of cars in that area had visible damage and were generally of fairly low value (in general).
When I gave a lift to an interview candidate at my company, who happened to be Polish, he remarked upon our habit of letting waiting cars out of side streets onto the main road. "That would not happen in Poland" he said, but I'm sure it does sometimes.
Speaking very, very generally, and given my experience does not extend to Scandinavia and quite a few other local-ish lands but does include US and Canada, I would tentatively suggest that the UK is generally a safe place to drive and is, generally, a forgiving driving environment. Our road signs are possibly the best anywhere but we do have too many signs in some places.
Driving in China would scare the shit out of me and I'm pretty confident behind the wheel.
Lane guidance is very helpful in these situations.
I drive it several times a year and I still need lane guidance to help.
It's also often useful to know how many lanes can be used for a turn, etc, so you can switch lanes early.
(My even-more-anecdotal experience is that Apple Maps tends to have better turn lane guidance than Google, which isn't something I'd remotely have guessed.)
Since I do not drive or use Waze for navigation I cannot see how this works for myself, but could it be that they put this there so that you as a driver have an opportunity to start offering to give people rides rather than taking one? As a person without a license, I would very much like to see more drivers in my area. I hope that Waze can find a way to encourage more drivers to opt in (and to do so without being obnoxious or intrusive) so that I could use the service more. So far I have been able to take only one trip in over a month of using the app because there are no matches found. I'm commuting in LA and it's hard to imagine that there are not more people whose commute is similar to mine.
Here in Germany the laws regarding texting and driving only regard a car as not driving if it is standing still and the engine is turned off.
In the UK it is only permissible if the engine is off AND the car is parked in a recognised or safe parking area. Engine off waiting at junction is not sufficient.
It is not clear to me whether these ads are being presented in Germany, the UK or anywhere else where responding would be a violation.
Also, whoever thought it was a great idea to permanently stick a button in the user interface that brings up an ad for Waze Carpool needs to be soundly whipped. I mean, I don't have any studies to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that when someone is in their car already, using Waze, they don't need to schedule a carpool pickup. Because they're in their car. Driving.