I've long thought that Waze creates the illusion of saving massive amounts of time, when its benefits are marginal (although real). I know I personally prefer an active commute to one waiting in traffic, even if travel times are identical. Waze seems to maximize for the latter.

[0] - https://arturgrabow.ski/2018/02/19/navigation-apps/amp/

After enough of those, I reluctantly stopped using Waze.

I use Waze mostly for the police presence. And there was a lot today (end of month...).

A nice feature would be if it sees more police presence than usual you just get a general warning "there's more police presence on your route than usual".

Even when sitting next to each other in the same car, Google Maps suggests radically different routes to the same destination on my wife’s phone than it does on mine, often with a 15+ min difference in arrival time. It must be testing different routing algorithms as otherwise they should be the same.

I imagine the distance is going to be wildly* nontrivial as well. You'd need to factor in traffic density, weather conditions, road works, predicted traffic density, actual distance as well as traffic speed, not to mention fuzzy human things like scenery. Just going for "shortest euclidian distance" will end up with routing through every alley and side-street if it's even the tiniest amount shorter.

I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a distance metric that looks essentially random unless you're deeply inspecting the graph at the time of routing to see why a certain route is shorter than another.

Of course that doesn't exclude A/B testing, but with google maps they clearly have a routing graph that's updating all the time. It's no surprise that asking for the same route twice can give you different answers. Not to mention they probably include a random factor on purpose so they don't route all the cars through the same street. Of course you'd want the random factor big enough to spread the load, but not so big that random people get shafted by a significantly longer commute.

Seems like an interesting problem to tackle actually, I should look at building an open street map based route planner sometime.

I think Waze only really saved time when it wasn't popular. Once everyone takes the same shortcut, you're back where you started.

I still use Google Maps when I'm unfamiliar with the drive for the reasons you mention (ie, it needlessly took me down a busy grid-locked road once).

But otherwise nothing beats Waze for the additional features like construction and police reporting plus it does a good job of finding fast routes far more often than not.

This really does call for a larger study, though. It would be nice to see how the error bars and potential differences come out across different trip times, and different drivers.

My intuition (listening to AI and DL podcasts) is that they just train too-general US-based (or evaluated or reinforced more specifically) models. Anyhow it's a disappointing situation that e.g. Google maps makes way more mistakes today than it did 5 years ago (but it also does more overall, I guess it's a trade-off, e.g. now it's great for public transportation in large enough cities).

I would be interested in trying out a "no left turns" (or at least no unprotected left turns) route preference.

There's a reason you seldom see UPS and FedEx trucks trying to turn left in crowded urban settings. It's because they cost time and money. Why don't Google and Apple understand that, and give us an option to avoid or discourage left turns?

Happens to me all the time.

It also seems to assume crossing a bridge at rush hour is cheap. My only guess, and this truly is a guess, it is sees people in the bridge lane stopped and the thru lane moving and takes the average.

Maps really need a “not worth it” features for tiny optimizations. I’d often prefer a slightly slower route that’s less work to drive.

> I’d often prefer a slightly slower route that’s less work to drive.

Me too, and I suspect most people — like, when is it ever a good option to avoid a free highway to save 1 minute when the driving is twice or more fatiguing? Are we bodyless machines or animals with a concept for "tired" and "attention"? This is where I feel recent evolutions in DL have been, perhaps, more for the benefit of developers and researchers (efficiency), and maybe not for real human benefits on the user side.

I don't claim the problem is easy, but I know second-hand that what users want and what AI projects solve for may be two very different X.

Seriously. I regularly travel from Ohio to Michigan and back, and often times if I take an exit for gas, Google Maps will assume I want to take an obscure country backroad for the final 2 hours rather than get back on the highway.

I absolutely do not want to worry about deer, a lack of gas stations, food, and light.

She’s certainly not wrong that from a UX perspective, simple can be really nice, especially if you’re driving on crowded roads and want to focus on driving.

It feels like cheating to the other drivers who didn’t take the “short cut” and leads to delays all around due to the extra merging going on. (exhibit A: I-85N vs. I-285 in Atlanta, aka Spaghetti Junction)

I also used to work for a company where I occasionally visited an office where Waze was really popular with the folks who worked there. And found that that, when we were meeting up somewhere halfway across town after work, I would typically get there before the Waze users about as often as they got there before me. So, not really much of a time saver. Judging from my experiences on the occasions that someone gave me a ride somewhere, I was probably having a more pleasant, albeit lower-tech, driving experience, too.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine Waze has a law of large numbers problem: The sample size they have for estimating the travel time along any given stretch of side road is smaller, and there's also a lot more ways to route oneself on the side roads, and those two factors compound to mean a relatively high chance that at least one of the routes Waze considers has been assigned a grossly over-optimistic travel time estimate.

I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale and when I go back I use Google maps. Waze would take you down roads I'd never use. Also I went to the keys and US1 had an accident. Google maps gave me a parallel road to save me 30 minutes. I thought it was wrong. I turned reluctantly and sure enough, it was a good route... Waze was like derp derp...which was probably to my advantage as everyone else sat in traffic.

I mostly use apple maps now with car play which is fine. After we moved my commute went from ~20-45 minutes to ~12 minutes so Waze really isn't a necessity anymore. :/

The problem is that having the speed traps and radar sites on there is just too crucial to give up. I've never found a replacement that does that.

Demonstrably untrue. There is an entire very technical industry for this sort of thing. People who take an interest in their communities and go to planning and city council meetings know this. Those who are not involved their communities just complain and blame it on The Man out to get them.

You need to break pretty hard to not get fined.

The industry being technical does nothing to prevent it's general rules from being dictated by politics. If an engineer does a study that shows no significant increase in injury by increasing the speed limit 10 MPH, I find it highly unlikely the city or state is going to approve it based on those findings.

My morning commute involves a blind left turn out of a residential street. Cars parked on the curb obstruct my view of oncoming traffic in the right lane. This isn't a problem when that traffic observes the 35 mph speed limit. I've had far too many close calls with self-centered jerks driving 55 mph in that lane. Sporty sedans are impossible to see over a row of parked cars.

Therefore, the fact that it's left up to the drivers to guess when it is safe and when it isn't means many folks are going to guess wrong and speed when it's unsafe. Would be much better if the signage just actually accurately reflected the safe limits.

Driving within a reasonable margin above the limit is safe on most roads, under good surface and visibility conditions.

(I wonder if the Waze ToS admits to having any crowdsourced data entered by users flow through to GoogleMaps?)

As for legality, the "content" you submit (which looks to include road condition/event submissions) is sub-licensable and transferable, https://www.waze.com/legal/tos "rights in content".

But Apple Maps has one massive advantage which is the reason I ditched Google Maps and that is the UX. I love how simple it is to read the maps. Important information is shown prominently during navigation and the UI feels super clean. Google Maps, on the other hands, feels really cluttered and slow. It takes a good few seconds just to see the map after you open the app because they are loading all the unnecessary BS like new restaurants, nearby events etc.