That’s perfectly reasonable but in a circumstance where someone is using maps they presumedly don’t know the directions, so probably won’t know the difficult intersections (would have to rely on other people’s assessments).
Don’t get me wrong, if they can find a solution then I’m all for it, I’m just not sure how it would work.
The intersection near me changes every few minutes so I’d never know if it would be problematic or not - let alone an intersection 50km away in an area with which I’m not familiar.
The best solution would be if Maps learned which intersections are dangerous, but if you’re driving it enough for it to learn, you probably already know to avoid it. Maybe if it could learn from ALL drivers it might work.
Yes, good point. The only way I know it’s bad is because I struggled with it once in the first place. Or maybe a friend told me. Either way, if it’s bad for one person, it’s bad for everyone, and so the better solution is for the software to consider some of the analytics I proposed and do it for us; and maybe Waze already does
One disappointment is that Google Maps on the web allows you to drag the suggested route to another road when you get directions, but the mobile apps don’t seem to have that feature. And if you use the share to phone option of the new customized route, it ignores what you’ve customized and gives you the standard route.
I wish Apple Maps would allow us to just drag a route somewhere else either before or even while navigating. Have it recalculate based on my dragging to an alternate. Kind of like Google Maps allows on the web.
One more thing that Apple Maps could improve is rerouting.
If I initiate navigation from A->B and Maps then offers A->C>B or A->D->B, I can choose say A->C>B. Now if I then take a wrong turn or a get forced on a detour it will reroute me back to B, but this time without any regard for my initial routing choice. More than once this ended up putting me on the initially declined A->D->B routing. If you switch from turn-by-turn to overview mode, you might catch this and be able to force back to the A->C->B you wanted, but if you’re in turn-by-turn mode chances are you’ll not notice until you realize Maps has put you on the path you didn’t want to take.
Long story short, rerouting needs to be improved to not just reroute, but base the rerouting on trying to get back to the route you initially chose over whatever just gets you to B the fastest.
I often use Waze and Google or Apple Maps at the same time. This is because I use Waze as my primary, have done so since it was new. I like that I can see my exact speed, which you can not in any of the other (at least here in Norway). The reason I use both is that my destination does not exist in Waze. Google and Maps work better for some destination like the bridge called “Cottage Bridge” out in the Norwegian Wilderness.
Doing the opposite should be possible, not to solve your wish but it might give you an indication of how good Waze is.
You can use Siri for starred destinations in Waze.
I recently tried to find a small coffee shop not far from where I live. Google Maps took me to the right shopping area but the wrong building. I decided to check Apple Maps, which also had the wrong building and also listed it as permanently closed, which it decidedly was not. I have no connection to the shop, but I think mapping services should be accurate. I sent corrections to both Google and Apple. Google sent me a confirmation email soon thereafter, and another when they fixed it a couple of weeks later. Apple has sent me exactly what you would expect - nothing - and has not yet fixed it (after a couple of months).
Anecdote - I live on Fuchsia Drive. Most people know that flower, but not how to spell it correctly. When mapping services first got popular, both Google and OpenStreetMaps had it misspelled. Both fixed it after I contacted them, but an oddity was that OpenStreetMaps first fixed it at some zoom levels but not all. I’m not sure what that tells us about their data storage system, but they fixed the others after I contacted them again.
Based on a few comments here I just installed Waze.
I entered a destination 11km away and it recommended an impossible route - telling me to turn right onto a major highway where you can’t turn right because of a median strip (keeping in mind in Australia turning right is turning across the traffic).
It offered two other options, neither of which is the most direct route. It’s not encouraging and based on this simple route, I’d be very reluctant to try it on a long, unfamiliar drive.
That’s not a failure of the algorithm. That’s a failure of the data. Waze’s map editor allows specifying exactly which directions a driver can go at an intersection, and available directions are separate for each approach to the intersection. On a divided road with a median, the intersections should be marked to not allow crossing the median. Submit a correction to Waze, and you should either see it fixed or hear back from an editor within a few days.
That’s irrelevant when I’m trying to do a simple route and it leads me to a ‘dead end’. As stated earlier, I’d have little confidence using it for a long, unfamiliar trip.
I’m not overly bothered, I find Apple Maps fine on the rare occasion I don’t know where I’m going.
Waze is no better than the collective of drivers that has made it. Maybe your area has few engaged users. Here in Norway, it has been very reliable for many years now.
I take a similar approach using Waze as my primary. I value the speed being visible as well as the audio alerts if I go over the limit. It’s not 100% accurate but close enough to be useful. The community posted police and hazard alerts are useful too.
I used Waze for a bunch of years, but stopped because it often recommends what I call d*ck moves: cutting through once peaceful neighborhoods and otherwise creating annoyances for other people.
Perhaps it has changed since then, but I still stay away.
How do you Waze to speak audible alerts? I have it enabled in the settings on my iPhone. But other than the initial Start, I get no audible cues. What am i doing wrong?
How are you playing the audio? From the phone’s speaker or from the car’s audio? And if you’re using the car’s audio, are you normally playing something else (like the radio)?
I’ve found that when using the car’s audio and listening to something else, it usually takes a second or two for the car to realize that there’s audio arriving from Bluetooth or USB in order to temporarily switch over to it from whatever you’re listening to. For navigation, this may take more time then the entire message.
One workaround is to just set the car’s stereo to only play audio from your phone. Of course, nobody wants to drive in silence in order to accommodate the navigation, but it might work OK if you play your music by streaming content from your phone.
The other (what I usually do) is to not connect the phone to the car, so the directions come from the phone’s own speaker. Of course, then you lose whatever car-phone integration your vehicle may support. For me, that’s fine because my car has no significant integration and I’m using the USB port to play music from my iPod, not my phone.
You’re assuming she’s not using CarPlay. If CarPlay shows the Waze map on the screen, the audio should just work perfectly, as long as the app doesn’t have the audio muted or the volume isn’t turned down.
@janesprando can you clarify if you’re using CarPlay or not?
David, my iPhone 15 connects to my car with Blue Tooth. I do play the radio on the car. I do not have any music on my phone. If I turn the radio off, then I won’t have any audio for the car. Phone calls do come through the car audio. I also use the car’s Navigation, but not when I tried using Waze.
If I recall correctly in Waze settings, there is something about connecting to another device (car) and I think I may have enabled that. What Waze settings do you use to have the audio directions just come from the phone? Maybe that’s my problem.
From within Waze, tap the hamburger menu in the upper-left corner. Then select Settings → Voice and Sound → Play sound via
From there, you have three choices:
Device default. Will send the sound wherever the rest of your phone’s sounds are going.
Play on phone speaker.
Play as Bluetooth phone call.
The last option is probably the cause of your problem. It makes its output appear as a phone call. So it goes through a “connect” sequence, plays its audio, then disconnects for each message. But your car probably takes a second or two to complete the connection, at which point most of the sound has already played.
There are two options you can choose instead:
Set Waze to “Play on phone speaker”. Now it won’t do a thing to your car stereo, but will use your phone’s speaker. Make sure to set the volume all the way up so you can hear it over road noise and such.
Set Waze to “Device default”, set your car stereo to Bluetooth audio, and then set your phone to send all of its audio to the car. Now the Bluetooth audio will always be connected, so there won’t be any delay when Waze wants to present audio. But this has some side effects:
It sends all of the phone’s audio to the car stereo. Which will include all alerts (text messages, calendar, etc.) and possibly also your ring tones when calls come in.
You can’t use any of your car stereo’s other inputs while doing this - radio, CD player, etc.
On the other hand, if you play music on your phone (e.g. streaming or synced from your Mac’s library), this is what you’d want anyway.
