I used to be a huge Waze fan, and I do still use it, but both Apple Maps and Google Maps provide much better UX in a lot of ways: I really miss lane guidance, for instance. I think Waze still has the best traffic guidance, but I'm pretty sure the number of times I've clicked "yes, now that you've shown me this ad, I would like you to stop the route I'm on now and take me 17 minutes out of my way to go to the nearest Burger King, thanks" is 0%.
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.
> "yes, now that you've shown me this ad, I would like you to stop the route I'm on now and take me 17 minutes out of my way to go to the nearest Burger King, thanks" is 0%.
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?
Most of the time I do. I only use Waze when on long-haul freeways, concerned about police & other traffic issues. I usually use Apple Maps as general runabout guidance, Google Maps when really concerned about best/scenic routes, Google Earth when interested in topography.
Whenever I hear people (and I hear it a lot) saying they use Waze to avoid police, I never really understand it. Waze is all user-reported, right? It's not a radar detector. So even if 100% of drivers are Wave users and they report 100% of police waiting at speed traps, there always has to be the first Waze user to encounter that cop without warning from their app. And that 100% number is a huge assumption.
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.
You don’t need 100% accuracy to save money using Waze. Even if they only catch 90% of speeed traps, that still saves you 90% of your speeding fines.
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.
‘This simple method will save you 100% of your speeding tickets and you will be surprised what it is’
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.
That's insane to my ears. Maybe it's just where I live, but speeding isn't just a fine you pay, it has legal ramifications. It's literally breaking the law. You get points on your license that causes your insurance to go up for years afterward, and after enough points, it causes your license to be taken away. It's not even unheard of for commercial drivers to be fired and not be able to get another job for as few as one or two speeding tickets.
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.
It’s a standard practice in traffic engineering to set limits based on 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic in good conditions. That apparently tends to produce an optimal speed limit from a crash/mortality perspective, but has the side effect of criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists. That’s a shockingly high number of otherwise law-abiding people who end up being on the wrong side of the optimization.
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 literally does not matter what the "safe speed" of a road is or how fast "free flowing traffic" will go. We have set a social contract, this is how fast traffic should go on this road. Pedestrians trying to cross the road now can accurately judge how quickly an oncoming car will reach them. Cars trying to pull out of side streets can now accurately judge how much time they have to enter the roadway. Cars entering the freeway can now judge how quickly the car behind them is approaching. It is impossible to tell if someone is coming towards you at 35mph or 55mph until it's too late.
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.
> It’s a standard practice in traffic engineering to set limits based on 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic in good conditions. That apparently tends to produce an optimal speed limit from a crash/mortality perspective, but has the side effect of criminalizing the conduct of 15 percent of motorists.
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.
Do you have a citation for that? It sounds plausible but I bet the real situation is more complicated.
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 don’t speed. I’m not cavalier about speeding and I resent you putting that on me. I am an extremely cautious driver.
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.
You'd be surprised just how good the user reporting is. I took a 7-hour drive through Ohio with a friend who has a very expensive, supposedly "detects everything" radar detector. We used Waze for the entire trip, as well. During that trip, Waze spotted every single police officer. I'm not sure what was going on, but there was a cop hidden about every five to ten miles on the trip -- something I've never seen before, despite trekking through Ohio on more than a few occasions[0]. His very expensive radar missed many of the cops (maybe they weren't firing the laser? who knows). The best part, though, was when we hit the Cincinnati and his radar had to be silenced due to all of the false positives it kept throwing. There was one false positive with Waze, which was barely a false positive as it was clear the police officer had moved and there were simply two entries for the same cop.
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.
I can’t even find words for how much I’d be against using what you describe while driving. From a UX perspective, but also from a general traffic safety perspective, this sounds like a dealbreaker. Why not just use AM or GM? I find the police reporting people mention here very dangerous and childish as well. Just don’t speed. It is quite easy.
The city I live in is not flat, nor rectilinear, nor logically arranged. Therefore, algorithmic traffic modelling is hard, statistical models from previous data aren't reliable, and shift happens. I can visualize the way, or the map, but I only have a very general idea which route is least congested now; enter traffic crowdsourcing, and voila...oh wait, it's all congested anyway, as the other Waze users get rerouted to alternates.
How do these things even exist? Obviously the people in the cars don't want them, and will never use them. Even the people A/B testing them should eventually figure that out.
I suppose it's the "better horse" paradox. A/B testing can only get you incremental improvements, to make the leap from a really good horse to a car, you need to make a bet and sustain it for a bit to get people comfortable enough to decide to try it out.
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.
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.
I guess it depends where, but in both London and Bordeaux (where I live and where I lived), on a dual carriage way you never know if right lane is right only, or right and straight ahead. Equally, the left lane could be left turn only, or left turn and straight ahead.
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 had the same issue when I was living in Geneva, especially when driving in dense traffic. You'd be on the right lane of a two lane road, and suddenly it turns to the right while the left lane continues on straight. And obviously there'd be no way to quickly go to the left lane anymore because the traffic is severely stuck anyway. So then you end up driving in the wrong direction, still stuck in traffic, and have to take a (sometimes significant) detour.
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...
Not always, but perhaps I misremember. It's usually printed on the road itself though, but you can't always see that because other cars are queued on top of it...
I’ve a particular junction in mind where there’s no street signage on the junction saying you can’t go straight in the left lane until you’re at the junction (which is around a bend), and he only road markings for it are covered by cars queueing to go straight. Google also gets this particular junction wrong.
One of the disadvantages of having round-abouts everywhere is that they aren't as well marked as they are in the states.
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.
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.
There's only one Magic Roundabout. It was the result of an open tender and I think that the winning team was from a local college. There were five roads leading into a weird space and it needed fixing. It's not as bad as it looks. Actually, it is as bad as it looks when you first encounter it.
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.
It's very simple: yield to people making a left from Shrivensham, then enter the first roundabout. The internal circle is not a roundabout, people already inside will yield to you. So you can continue going forward (over the KEEP CLEAR area) and navigate around the center anti-clockwise. You yield again to people from Shrivensham and depending on what exist you want you need to traverse another one or two roundabouts and exit the desired road.
If you need excitement in Europe, I can recommend anywhere near or in Naples (Napoli) or Rome, Paris, Deutsche Autobahns and most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
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.
China is a whole different world driving-wise. After I got in a cab in Guangzhou, the driver immediately made a u-turn across 4 lanes of traffic, then drove the wrong way into a 5(?) lane roundabout (explaining "shorter this way"--he would have needed to go almost all they way around in the "correct" direction). No other drivers honked or indicted real surprise with either maneuver.
Try driving around in New Jersey, especially close to New York. There are some exits, for example, where the exit is two lanes, but one of the lanes splits off from the main lane, but you better be in that left lane because you have to keep left right after you take that right exit... and then take another right after that.
Lane guidance is very helpful in these situations.
You get this north of Chicago a lot too... on I-294 merge into the right two lanes, keep left, pass the exit, merge into the right lane, keep right, merge left to finally get onto I-90.
I drive it several times a year and I still need lane guidance to help.
It's intuitive, until it isn't. I can from the top of my head cite various autobahn crossings in Germany where you need to keep on the left to ultimately go right because you're going through an underpass: The A81 crossing in Heilbronn coming from Heidelberg, the crossing at Dreieck Funkturm in Berlin coming from Potsdam, ...
It's also often useful to know how many lanes can be used for a turn, etc, so you can switch lanes early.
Google Maps has been a lifesaver in Sydney CBD for me as a driver unfamiliar with the Byzantine lane timing required, lack of signalling, and frequent undocumented works and blockages (I do wish they'd incorporate the random M5 closures though). It does get laggy and imprecise once you get in the area with tall buildings though.
At least around the SF Bay Area, there are often freeway exits and splits where multiple lanes are turning in one direction, but you want to be in a specific lane for an immediate upcoming split or turn. If I don't know the specific turn I'm taking (I've never been there, perhaps, or I'm just not there too often), this can definitely save me the aggravation of trying to navigate across several busy lanes of traffic to make a turn on the other side of the road.
(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.)
I was driving through Atlanta the other day for the first time and now appreciate the value of lane guidance. You can be on an 8 lane highway with three simultaneous exit options. If you find yourself in the wrong lane it is not an enjoyable experience.
> 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
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.
I presume that's the idea. I'm not questioning the idea as much as this particular implementation. :) If I ran the zoo, I would have sent a message to everyone's inbox (at least, everyone in areas that Waze Carpool exists!) once, then updated the app to have a "Learn about Carpool" link somewhere that is not the main driving screen.
How does that integrate with the prevalence of stop-start engine technology nowadays?
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.
May I ask for a source? I heard the opposite. Your car must not participate in traffic when you use the phone. It's fine if you're parked somewhere and have the engine off. But being parked at an intersection where people would expect you to react to traffic doesn't allow you to use the phone.
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.