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Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

For about six months before I moved closer to work I had a super commute between Olympia, WA to Kent, WA just south of Seattle. I do not recommend this.

Anyways- for the first month or so I used Waze religiously as this is a notoriously bad commute. I realized after a few nasty trips through Fife that unless you were among th very first few people to catch a rerouting, the roads people were routed to were painfully undersized to handle freeway traffic. I have not used Waze since and am very cautious when following Google map redirections.

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Waze has given me a lot of stupid advice in the last couple years. It will take me off a freeway, requiring many lane changes in heavy traffic, only to route me onto a clogged surface street and back onto the freeway after an exit or two. It usually fails to save me any time, and causes a lot of headaches. I stick with Google Maps now unless I need the police and hazard warnings(long road trips mostly).

I've had similar experiences with Waze. These sorts of things drive me insane. All of this sort of maneuvering around and jockeying for position... For what? If I'm lucky I can save myself 5 minutes? No, thank you. I wish these apps had options to turn that stuff off.

Having said that, I'm not a SoCal native but I've been here for over a decade now. It drives some of my SoCal native friends up the wall that I won't get in the freeway for only one or two exits, etc... I just don't operate at that pace of life.

That's the whole point of Waze: if you weren't trying to frantically get somewhere as fast as possible, no matter the cost (I mean, this app is even trying to warn you about police cars so you can get a lower risk for constantly speeding...) you would download a more mainstream app.

Okay, but, Google Maps has speedtrap warnings, too, though.

I may be mistaken, but I think only in certain locations - I've certainly never been able to use it (maybe I just haven't found out how to turn it on)

I just observed one day that it was turned on. I don't recall when, but I do recall where. I was on the I-15 driving north from the Lake Elsinore area towards Corona and saw a weird icon on the map. Had my wife check it out and we learned that it was speed trap notifications.

In my experience, they're never accurate. In fact, it's almost laughable how inaccurate they are. Google really expects me to believe that US-1 in NJ is going to have speed traps? A highway where cops regularly do the Jersey Shuffle at 90+ MPH with no emergency to justify doing 25+ over the limit? Yeah right.

It's one thing when it happens once in VA (a state I'm used to seeing lots of speed traps in) and there is no cop, it's another entirely when it happens in a state where the cops are the biggest speeders.

It seems to be based on self-reporting, so I'm sure it's 80% worthless.

But, the whole reason I brought this up in the first place is because: 1) Google Maps is as mainstream of a maps app as one can find, and it has speed trap reporting, and it will also try to re-route you around gridlock, which I personally find to be little more than a pointless exercise in frustration, and, 2) I noticed that it (speed trap reporting) was actually quite accurate, surprisingly so, in fact, on _a_ recent trip along the I-5 north and then again south through Kern and Kings county (which are notorious for their speed traps, Kings specifically).

I don't generally speed fast enough to get pulled over, I set my cruise control at 7mph over the speed limit on the highway. It's still nice to know that there may be a speed trap coming up, especially if you're driving through one of the perpetually-under-construction zones on a California highway.

> It usually fails to save me any time, and causes a lot of headaches.

If it takes you much more time and effort to navigate traffic than the average road user you won't benefit much from Waze because any gains in time will be negated by the time penalty (relative to average) every time you need to do something that requires being aggressive (merging, left turns, etc). Similarly if you're driving a large commercial vehicle you should probably not use Waze.

I'm at the point where I check Google Maps, then Apple maps (to confirm Apple maps isn't sending me to the wrong place) then close Google maps - Gmaps rerouting can be horrible, and is opt-out which can be tough to notice sometimes.

I'll stick to arterial roads, thankyouverymuch, and take my chances. Once in France it sent us on a dirt road - the car with my other family got there 10m faster by sticking to the autoroute.

The opt-out for rerouting is a truly awful design choice.

One time I was driving up through NYC during a heavy downpour where visibility was only a few car-lengths ahead. Traffic had slowed to about 30 mph on the NJTP and most people thankfully had their hazard flashers on. Then Google Maps decides to distract me and pile on the anxiety with multiple "press no in the next 10 seconds or else!" re-routing prompts to save at most 5 minutes.

Just yesterday I got a pop-under to "confirm" that a speed trap was still in effect, which of course obscured some vital information on screen for a few minutes until it finally gave up.

Demanding that your user take their attention off the road to fumble with a touch screen just to stay on the route they're comfortable with is dangerous, and if I opt out once it should at the very least snooze those alerts.

It seems like Waze should be smarter by slowly shunting a portion of traffic to alternative routes, and seeing how much it can support.

Ironically, I did the reverse commute for several months, which wasn't bad at all, provided I timed my trip thru JBLM correctly.

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