Why Waze is so popular in Costa Rica (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why Waze is so popular in Costa Rica (2014)

washingtonpost.com

54 pointshownottowrite45 comments

Costa Rican here. The article doesn't come close explaining the complexity (and inconvenience) of addresses in Costa Rica. We even use landmarks which no longer exist (e.g. from the old pharmacy in X, take a left), or use any distinctive surrounding object for official guidance (trees, fences, wall color).

Landmark usage for directions is greatly due to poor city planning throughout the last century and the address culture grown around it. Most city streets do have names/numbers, but are pretty much unknown to the common citizen. Waze and its contributors have done a truly amazing job. I believe OSM has lagged behind Waze because Waze was the first GPS nav system that actually worked in the country, and was therefore so greatly welcomed.

P.D. Nokia maps also worked decently, but GPS-capable nokia phones were scarce in the market.

Nokia's map data lives on as "HERE" https://www.here.com/?map=9.9258,-84.0787,8,normal

In the US, there were some pretty significant efforts to standardize road names and house numbering (this largely happened at the county level). One of the big reasons was to improve fire response, which was largely accomplished by pushing the system in the direction of being logical (so roads in a county will often be numbered sequentially and the like).

Are there agencies in Costa Rica that would push such a standardization, or if the existing names and numbers are already reasonable, push the use of them?

My understanding in the US is that a lot of the naming rationalization was done as part of the E911 location-aware service. This included giving numbers to properties that either didn't have them or at least didn't commonly use them (like summer cottages). It also involved, for example, giving segments of roads different names if they weren't connected or if they had multiple branches. It also largely rationalized cases where roads had different names in the USPS database and on local maps. (My house effectively had two different addresses when I moved in and I always needed to make sure local service people knew where was house was; on more than one occasion I was accused of giving someone the "wrong" address for my house.)

This largely happened before the widespread consumer use of GPS, but it certainly helped when GPS rolled out.

I guess E911 caused some further effort.

My grandfather died in 1994, and one of the things in his garage was an old road sign that had names, rather than the numbers that are in use today (he had been township clerk, I guess he quit that some years before).

Searching a bit finds lots of projects that were done ~1950 or earlier (often in the context of making it easier for new residents to find their way around).

I think the use of road names will depend a lot on the local governments (called municipalidades). Many streets don't have signage labeling them with their names. Much recently (a few years ago), the Municipalidad de San José started putting street name signage, bus route signage, etc.. So I think we will eventually get there somewhere in the future. Regarding postal codes, Correos de Costa Rica already publishes codes at the Distrito level (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Costa_Rica)

Plus, Waze is helping also. Every time I use it, I can hear a street's name.

I have quite literally used "Left at the spot where there is usually a cow grazing next to a bus stop" to tell people to find my house.

I wish they'd have contributed to openstreetmap instead!

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Pretty sad that they contributed hundred of hours of their time that they could lose any second if Google decided to ditch Waze.

Openstreetmaps allows you to download all the data for free.

Yup. And it's really great data, too. Building names, classification of building types, etc.

I did a project with a friend last semester using PostGIS with data from OSM and google glass. We learned a lot.

http://www.madisonar.com/

Presumably Google would incorporate that data into Google Maps if it's valuable, not simply delete it.

And I wish open street map was licensed in a way to make it more usable and useful to the world.

What's wrong with the licensing?

"If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL."

It's basically a GPL vs MIT issue. A lot of people think GPL is better for great reasons. A lot of people think MIT is better for great reasons. I fall in the latter camp.

http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/

I was going to write that I thought it was silly to convolute software licensing with data licensing, but I can't really find any fundamental difference between them.

All that does is prevent Google from slurping OSM into Google Maps and not giving anything back. I don't see how it prevents it from being "usable and useful". If anything, it makes it more useful because if everyone contributes to OSM, it means we're not constantly reduplicating effort.

Like I said, it's the same debate as GPL vs MIT which has been had on the Internet a million times.

Symbiotic vs Parasitic describes it better.

A million and one.

A more damning criticism of OSM licensing is that it's incomprehensible. Let's say you want to create something based on OSM data. Do you have to make your creation available under the ODbl? You can subscribe to the legal talk list if you want to see a parade of people trying to figure out how it works.

More practical is to just armchair-lawyer the terms and just hope that nobody gets upset with you.

I'm always impressed by how hard people will work for a for-profit company for no pay. Anyone here ever work for CDDB back in the day?

There is return on investment even if it is not monetarily. Users or reCAPTCHA or Duolingo also do work for for-profit companies as well.

From the article:

> “Some people ask ‘Why do you work for free? Why do you spend so many hours a week doing this mapping?’ ” Hidalgo said. “You feel good about knowing that the people who drive around everyday save time because you are investing your time in fixing the roads and doing this mapping.”

I wouldn't do it either, but it sounds like they are solving a problem for the people around them.

(A simple way to look at it is that if Google/Waze manage to extract some amount $X in profit because of their effort, it is very likely that the people using the product derived a benefit greater than $X from that same effort. It's also possible that some benefit is delivered to the users from things that Google/Waze doesn't manage to profit off of.)

.. and before CDDB, it was Viewpoint Data Labs .. its a part of the heritage of the Internet at this point.

> “Most of our streets don’t have road names so a lot of the addresses end up being very much next to some kind of landmark associated with it, and that’s how we give directions,” Urbina said. “There’s never been good maps generated to be able to get to where you’re trying to go.”

How does a country not name its streets? I just can not wrap my head around that very concept. Here in the US, we name hiking trails and put it on the maps.

Japan, for instance, numbers blocks and leaves the empty space between them nameless.

I walked around Tokyo a bit last year and without my phone + Wifi I would have been horribly lost. There are no street signs anywhere.

I can get around Tokyo for the most part at a gross level--as in I can find parks, railroad stations, and the like. But I think I spent an hour the last time I was there searching for my company's office. Guidebook authors should start thinking about including GPS coordinates although increasingly, given a network connection, it's a moot point given Google Maps.

Does anyone know what the market leader for GPS (for native and non-native users) in Japan is?

Japan does not use street-based addressing:

http://www.planettokyo.com/trip-planning/getting-around/the-...

This really shows how using technology can leapfrog very costly gradual infrastructure upgrades in terms of both time and cost. Amazing!

It does make we wonder though... Google Maps / Waze must get a decent amount of information from tax funded sources. Do they give back helpful information such as e.g. traffic flow/conditions in this example as well? Without having to participate in a special 'campaign'?

I spent 10 days in Costa Rica last month and didn't have a data plan with me (so Waze is way less useful).

I used (and liked) the maps from Cenrut.org, which are easy to install on a Garmin device I brought with me. You can also rent GPSs from the car rental places, but for a long stay, it's just as cheap to buy a Garmin here in the states and install the free Cenrut maps.

The Cenrut data wasn't perfect, but it was way more than adequate. It would be madness to try to navigate the country from only a printed street map!

Same issues here in Panama. We love Waze in Panama!

Waze is very useful here in CR. Many businesses here even put a Waze link on their contact page.

Do you know why they favor Waze over something like openstreetmaps.org? Is it related to the tooling? Did it just become popular first?

Does openstreetmaps have a proper cross-platform phone app with turn by turn instructions while you are driving that works well - and does it have a good majority of costa rican roads?

Yeah, I think it is, in fact, because Waze is very easy to use for everyone, especially for people with non-technical backgrounds. The support for Spanish locale must be another reason.

Note however, that I haven't used OSM myself, so I can't truly compare them fairly.

Voice turn by turn nav and traffic updates and reporting cops, roadwork etc. I use it even on my commute just to get those alerts.

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