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Apple Maps vs. Google Maps vs. Waze

• will_walker 9y ago
  This is great. Waze provides an additional service here - pointing out police locations, which is extremely useful over long stretches of highway. I wonder if google Maps' performance is due in part to Waze users being shunted off of main highways? Another weird though - if Waze is spoon feeding you ads, don't they want you to drive as long as possible?
  • tomtang0514 9y ago
    But waze doesn't point out police by itself, waze user did that when they're driving. And I really don't want the drivers in the cars around me doing that...
  • radicaldreamer 9y ago
    You can leave it running in the background to do this while routing with Google Maps in the foreground, it'll call out speed traps and hazards and police with it's voice in the background
• jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Here is the best comparison I have seen with Apple maps and Google maps hands down. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ Google Maps's Moat - Justin O'Beirne
  • grzm 9y ago
    Lengthy HN discussion (over 600 comments!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653
  • SEJeff 9y ago
    I came to the comments for this post literally to post that article, which articulates things nicely.
  • eridius 9y ago
    That's a very detailed article, but it's all about the information present on the map, not about the accuracy of routing.
  • rconti 9y ago
    I know this is a popular resource, and I can't argue with the author's conclusions on what he points out, but I am CONSTANTLY let down by Google Maps' choices of which buildings to visualize and label. Apple Maps does a WORSE job of showing every building but a vastly superior job of providing context and labels that make sense to me. I've looked at Google Maps views of areas I know quite well and been completely unable to 'place' myself there and understand what I'm looking at, because it's so detached from reality. I obviously am not good at putting this into words, but I encourage you to look at a local shopping district in the same level of zoom detail on each and compare. EDIT: Because I'll rightfully be criticized for not providing examples, I took a few screenshots of the movie theater complex in downtown Redwood City. In the first example, showing several blocks, Google shows 3 businesses by name, and one unlabeled restaurant. How on earth is this the gold standard? Apple Maps shows VASTLY more business names, far more detail on buildings, etc. For the second set of pictures, zoomed in to the theater complex itself (1 block), Google shows VASTLY more building detail about things I simply don't care about -- it's all one structure, there's no way to walk between building units, so why do I care which one is distinct? Google makes it look like there's an alleyway there, and there simply isn't. Sure, maybe it's an internal hallway for the parking garage, so congrats for having that detail, but it's not helpful as a pedestrian. Again, far fewer businesses are listed (though their locations are probably more precise/useful because you can tell how many units are between each, where apple's are sorta thrown around for no reason (no, Vitality Bowls is not actually on the sidewalk, it's in the building like the others). The Google map does get credit for making a more prominent display of the Redwood Downtown 20 and XD movie theater which is the bigger landmark, where Apple might leave you wondering "hey, what's this Sagamore Enterprises building all about?" Just an example, but this happens to me ALL the time. I am constantly finding that Google isn't giving me the most important information, and then sometimes goes into excessive detail on something that either doesn't matter or is totally misleading. https://imgur.com/a/9Mlbz https://imgur.com/a/9Mlbz
• myrandomcomment 9y ago
  So I switched to CarPlay so I am forced to use Apple maps. It’s not that bad. I think the turn by turn is better then Google was. The only issues I cannot figure out is when you have to paths showing on the screen (dashboard screen) and you want to pick the other one (not default). There seems to be no way to do that. You just have to know to make that alternate turn then it picks it up.
  • bdcravens 9y ago
    I haven't done it yet, but it's possible to jailbreak and put any app on CarPlay.
    • bowmessage 9y ago
      Now we get to risk running malware / bricking our cars too :) great!
      • bdcravens 9y ago
        My car also supports the same functionality for Android, with all the permissiveness that goes with. I can only presume there's isolation between essentially an external display for the phone and the car's core features.
        • bri3d 9y ago
          Yes, especially in the case of CarPlay it's just a second display streaming protocol. Additionally, most auto nav systems run on a separate CAN (Controller Area Network) bus although this isolation is usually extremely leaky and not particularly secure (the "gateways" linking the system are often full of memory safety exploits at best or simply pass malicious messages between buses or don't verify anything at worst). But in short, jailbreaking your iPhone is much more dangerous for the security of your personal data on your phone than the integrity of your car.
  • pat2man 9y ago
    As far as I can tell you have to choose at the beginning, once you locked a route in you have to cancel and start over to get another route.
• erichurkman 9y ago
  This matches my experience trying to use Waze, multiple times, over multiple years. Sometimes the "creative" routes would seem to save time, other times exiting the freeway to take a surface street would have me sitting at the offramp for 10 minutes... possibly with all of the other Waze users who were routed that way. There's also a familiarity level of safety taking known routes. Sure, cutting down some residential side streets might save 60 seconds, but no kid is going to run out into the road chasing a soccer ball on 101.
  • mistahchris 9y ago
    Traveling the weird routes that waze sends me on is way more stressful to me than sitting in traffic. Especially now that I have an electric car. So I deleted Waze pretty quickly to just go with the mainstream apps. That being said, I'd still rather walk or bike than drive, even if it takes a little longer.
    • vl 9y ago
      >Especially now that I have an electric car. But how electric car makes sitting in traffic better?
      • what_ever 9y ago
        One can take the HOV lane with an electric car.
        • rxhernandez 9y ago
          You can configure waze for hov routes
          • what_ever 9y ago
            Oh right, forgot that they added it. But have never had a chance to use it.
          • 9y ago
• spike021 9y ago
  Google Maps has been steering me wrong quite often the past 6 months, including instances where it has me pass the landmark or business that I am driving to, turn into a private residential neighborhood, go two to three blocks in, and say "you've arrived at your destination". Tempted to try Apple Maps again now that it's improved since launch.
  • drewg123 9y ago
    Its funny, Google Maps has been doing almost the opposite for me -- always insisting that I go in the main entrance to a property, and continuing to route me after I've parked at the location and exited my car. For example, I was trying to get to a shop at an intersection where going in from the minor street would have been easy. Instead it, it wanted me to make 3 turns to go in on the main street.
    • daurnimator 9y ago
      And not only the main entrance: google maps will route me so that I always end up driving along the side of the road the destination is on. I don't mind crossing the road on foot if it gets me there 5 minutes faster! and infact, at my apartment there is usually more parking on the other side of the road...
  • eridius 9y ago
    Every time I take a Lyft to the main Kaiser Permanente offices here in SF and the driver uses Lyft's built-in mapping (powered by Google Maps), the directions always instruct them to go past the desired street and turn into the alley behind the building. I cannot figure out why it does this, and I can't figure out how to complain about this. I'm unsure if the native Google Maps app does this too (I uninstalled it years ago so I can't test myself).
  • sgc 9y ago
    Could it in any way be related to recent gps disruption in the Western US? I am certain it has happened to me a couple times where the gps could not understand I was already on the interstate, and then the issue disappeared with no intervention the next day.
• remir 9y ago
  I used Apple Maps a couple of times and it did its job well. The UI is pleasant and simple to use and the directions are clear and accurate. When there was an error on the map, giving feedback was easy and the map was corrected relatively quickly. But to me, the main advantages of Google Maps are Streetview, offline caching and better POI. Web access is also a huge plus because there's way more eye balls seeing the map and making corrections so I bet Gmap is more accurate.
  • Angostura 9y ago
    The other advantage of Google Maps is that it's search is much better at finding the landmark or point of interest you want to get to. Apple Maps Search is really hit and miss. A school local to me is called Rushcroft Foundation School. Everyone calls it Rushcroft School. Apple Maps completely fails to find it under that name.
    • sbuk 9y ago
      Anecdataly, Google, despite being repeatedly told, routes people incorrectly to my house. The Street is a mews that shares part of its name with a street 1 over. The amount of deliveries that have "failed" because people blindly trust Google is just ridiculous.
• gigatexal 9y ago
  I’ve been burned by Apple maps too many times. I just use google maps now.
• epberry 9y ago
  One feature I miss in navigation services is an ability to choose the “easy” route. For example, I live in the Midwest and usually I’d rather take the interstate, even if it’s 5 minutes longer, than a series of country roads. Obviously you can choose this when you know where you’re going but forget it if you’re in an unfamiliar area. A simple heuristic for this would be which route involves the fewest different roads.
  • wyager 9y ago
    I want the opposite of this; sometimes when I’m on a road trip, I want to drive through random one- or two-lane roads that go through super cool areas. One time when I was driving cross-country (US) google routed me for about 10 miles through a 1.5-lane road through a forest instead of the highway. It was magical. Beautiful, winding roads, tons of animals, etc. It’s super hard to find roads like that normally.
    • maxerickson 9y ago
      If you are committed enough, you can convince OSMAnd to avoid larger highways. It comes with an option to avoid freeways, which is just a parameter in the routing specification: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/routing/routing.xml#L66 https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro... So then you can add similar parameters for other major highway types (or one that groups them). Like I say, committed. I guess BRouter could do similar.
  • jinonoel 9y ago
    That would be a great feature. Where I live Waze usually decides that the quickest route is through a series of side streets through less than ideal areas in the city. There should be a way tell Waze that there's a reason few cars pass through there
  • dawnerd 9y ago
    This!! I prefer to take roads wheres theres protected turns if its making me take a left. I hate trying to take a left onto a highway from a small road. Really need an option to prefer bigger roads.
• intopieces 9y ago
  Waze's interface looks like a child's toy, representing its users as fat sperms with wheels. Also, I don't want to take 100 side roads to save 3 minutes and I don't care where the police traps are. They're not pulling me over while I'm going 35 in traffic. As for Apple Maps vs Google Maps, whichever comes up when I shot at my device for directions is what I use. No real preference, so long as I don't have a robot voice shouting at me.
• tzs 9y ago
  I'd like to see a review of how the various navigation apps do in situations with unusually heavy, unusually widespread traffic, such as when people were trying to go home after the 2017 total eclipse in the US. I was using Waze when leaving Madras, Oregon, after the eclipse heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington. It suggested a route that would bypass a couple miles of slow traffic, but the road it sent me down was a dirt road with a periodic undulation in it that caused massive vibration, and my car and the two or three others that were on it were throwing up so much dust it was very hard to see. I turned around and went back to the main route and put up with the slow traffic. A friend of mine was also leaving Madras, but heading to California. He was using Google. It also was giving some poor route advice. Here's what he told me when we compared notes of our trips home: > Google kept sending us onto logging roads: we bailed on the first when we were told to turn onto a non-existent road; we bailed on the second when a van came out and told us that ~5 cars were stuck axle-deep in mud; we bailed on the third when we got to a sign informing us that we were about to enter an off-road-vehicle trail. I'd also like to see a review of how the various cell phone companies handled it. Both me and my friend are on T-Mobile, and something like 90% of the text messages we tried to exchange were either lost or delivered hours late. I think we managed one or two short voice calls. Most voice calls either did not connect, or on occasion would connect but only one of us could hear the other.
  • smilekzs 9y ago
    I was on the same route as you. Fortunately we (me with my friend) were in an SUV with AWD, and had a lot of fun drifting through a trail (maybe not the same one you got) following advice from Google Maps. Oh yeah and we did get ahead of miles of stuck traffic.
    • StudentStuff 9y ago
      Huh, I got really lucky leaving when I did, we decided to ditch Madras slightly before 10am and got up to Warm Springs, where we pulled over and watched the eclipse. Then, it was empty roads on US 26 as we went back at 90mph to 110mph till we hit Gresham and stopped off. Never seen my car driven that fast, but it sure did beat sitting in traffic!
• Spooky23 9y ago
  Waze is great as long as there isn’t many lights or stop signs. I enjoy using it on road trips. For commutes, I don’t get the point, but I also don’t have a long commute. I find Google Maps too distracting as a driver. I like to know the route and it always recalculates. Apple Maps usually uses simpler routing.
• arenaninja 9y ago
  Recently switched from Android to iOS, and I haven't felt the need to install google maps. Apple Maps does everything I need it to. The navigation feels the same but I find the turn-by-turn instructions better on apple maps. I was on the bandwagon when we were making fun of apple maps for telling people to drive out into the middle of the ocean, so it seems to have come a long way since
• capkutay 9y ago
  Just personally I'll never use Apple Maps because their customer/developer support suck. I've filed numerous tickets on one intersection that's been closed for 2.5 years in Downtown San Francisco of all places. Yet Apple Maps still routes uber drivers through there forcing them to do a 10 minute roundabout. When they pick me up I again have to direct them not to follow Apple Maps. I don't know why they persistently decide to not fix it, but that headache has made me assume Apple Maps doesn't really give a crap about customer satisfaction therefore their other features will probably suck too.
  • threeseed 9y ago
    That’s really strange. I’ve made literally dozens of changes around Australia. Changes to POIs, street names, off ramps etc. Every single one has been actioned although usually takes a few weeks. The problem with Apple Maps is they source the data from third parties so it’s up to them whether changes are accepted or not.
  • aeontech 9y ago
    Out of curiousity, what intersection was it, and is it still unfixed?
    • capkutay 9y ago
      Yes. It's the roundabout on Otis st in mission bay.
      • aeontech 9y ago
        I don't see an Otis St on google maps in Mission Bay, what are the cross streets?
  • dpkonofa 9y ago
    Like most support systems for mapping, I have to imagine that it only triggers an actual ticket if multiple people report an issue at that same spot. Make sure you have your friends report it too and any Uber/Lyft drivers that get tied up there. That'll get it fixed in a jiffy.
• JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  The only reason I use Apple Maps is I trust Cupertino with my map queries, which can mindlessly leak lots of information. They aren’t trying to sell me ads and have a record of putting privacy first.
  • wmeredith 9y ago
    As long as you're not a Chinese citizen, you should be alright! /s
• adfskjldsjfk 9y ago
  The article didn't take into consideration trip time adjustments while en route. Traffic condition changes and the app might suggest an alternative route. lane by lane navigation in Google Maps really helps, not sure why Waze still doesn't havr it. Waze is really good at adapting to "static" incidents, but still need improvement for moving congestions (e.g. workers on a truck putting down cones ahead of you )
• what_ever 9y ago
  Isn't 120 rides too few to come to a conclusion? Specially with different routes, different conditions? It would have been better to see if they all told to take the same route and then compare the predicted time as well as actual time. It's possible that it started raining in one of the case or there was an accident, which added a lot of time to the predicted time. FWIW, I use Google Maps and Waze alternately. I always arrive a minute or two earlier than the GMaps predictions. It's easy to note this from the summary page after you complete the ride. Waze, sadly, doesn't provide any summary. No idea about Apple Maps as I use Android. Disc: Googler.
  • emdowling 9y ago
    It is conclusive for his usage, which is the majority of trips he took in 2017. It will make him make an objective, informed decision going forward. I would also say it is relevant for a large percentage of people on HN. Should he not share this information because it isn't scientifically conclusive?
    • what_ever 9y ago
      I never said the author shouldn't publish it. I find the method, data and the conclusion presented flawed.
• cromwellian 9y ago
  Waze pointing out police and road hazards has saved my bacon a lot. Sometimes it routes me wrong, but sometimes I distrusted it's recommendation to go through a side street, only to slam into a huge traffic jam that it was routing me around. Nowadays, I use Waze but look at the route, and if it is overcomplicated, I look to see if it did it for obvious reasons (traffic jams). Apple Maps is pretty awful for me, it doesn't give enough detail on turns (like what lane to be in), and its POI database sucks. Too many times I've typed in the name of a place that's local and its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away. In non-US/European countries, like if you're driving in South America, don't even bother.
  • chipotle_coyote 9y ago
    The current version of Apple Maps has lane guidance which works pretty well in the areas I've used it (around a fair amount of northern California, not just the SF Bay area, as well as the Tampa Bay area in Florida). Google certainly has a better POI database, although for the example you gave ("its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away") I'm not sure whether the issue is Apple's database as much as its flaky searching of its own database. I tend to explicitly give it cities when I'm searching for businesses. I suspect if I were in another country, though, I'd quickly give up and just use Google.
• freshyill 9y ago
  What I like about Waze: All the data other than the route itself, he location of speed traps most importantly. What I like about Apple Maps: The actual on-screen navigation experience. I find it’s the clearest about which lane I need to be in. Waze is terrible about weirdly-shaped intersections and ramps, both in the maps themselves and the instructions about where I need to be to turn/exit. If you think all the alleys and left turns are annoying, that’s nothing. On I-270, outside DC, it often has me bouncing back and forth between the local and express lanes, for no reason. Probably because some other user nearby in each lane is going a slightly different speed.
  • megy 9y ago
    > he location of speed traps most importantly. How in any was is that legal or ethical to have that data available.
    • lolsal 9y ago
      What legal or ethical laws does it violate to have that data available?
      • hokumguru 9y ago
        You can buy a radar detector on amazon or $50, I'd say probably not many otherwise those would be much more regulated.
        • jcranmer 9y ago
          I grew up in Virginia, where radar detectors are illegal. I was surprised to learn that Virginia is in fact the only US state to ban radar detectors. It's also the only state to consider going 20 over the speed limit (or over 80 even on a 70mph highway) automatic reckless driving.
        • lolsal 9y ago
          It's not illegal to know where police are, even if it may be illegal to operate a radar detector.
• athenot 9y ago
  2 years ago I went on the (rocky & dirt) forest "roads" in the North Georgia mountains with my Jeep, and at the top of the dirt trail, I encountered a couple of hikers who drove their rental Nissan Versa into a mud pit. They had blindly followed their GPS and were completely stuck. I was too busy helping them get out of their predicament to notice exactly what they were using but I know that it wasn't Apple Maps (they were on Android). Actually, Apple Maps will refuse to route me though any of the forest service "roads" and shys away from unpaved ones (though I've found exceptions). Only if I set a intermediate destination in the middle of the forest will it route me through those trails. Back in city/suburbs, I've found the same as the author, in that Apple pads the time with a few extra minutes. I appreciate that realism because it only takes a few poorly timed traffic lights to add a few minutes to the estimate. I suspect there is some logic around building padding around lights at large intersections because I noticed that when the destination is right after a major intersection, that padding remains until I clear that intersection—and that doesn't seem to happen when the destination is much further after a big intersection.
• chisleu 9y ago
  Forget the trip times. Apple maps routinely failed to work correctly, often sending me in circles and telling me to take streets that didn't exist (walking paths, etc). Waze has only one thing going for it, and that is the ability to see speed traps. Often it requires keeping an eye on it ahead of your current position as the cops move around now that Waze has become popular. However, my car doesn't like to use Waze instead of Google Maps. If I hit the "navi" button while in Android Auto mode, it will always bring me to google maps even if I'm currently navigating in Waze. That caused me to stop using Waze entirely, but it is not the fault of Waze themselves, but Mercedes poor technology.
  • sorahn 9y ago
    I have a similar issue with my head unit. It will stop whatever music I'm currently listening to and start pandora. It's obnoxious enough that I just don't have pandora installed on my phone anymore.
• ctrlrsf 9y ago
  Waze always has the latest accident and traffic reports. There are three main routes to my job. I always open it up in the morning and check travel times for each one (just press Routes button instead of Go). I have my preferred route, which is always fastest and shortest, but if Waze ever suggests one of the other two, I know I should listen. When I look into it, it’s usually some major accident or something affecting a lane of travel. The few times I ignored it I deeply regretted it. Makes the difference between a 60 minute commute vs a 90 min commute on a bad day.
  • exhilaration 9y ago
    Google Maps is the same for me. Some of the accidents in Google Maps are labeled "reported by Waze" or something like that. It seems like I get the best of both worlds: crowdsourced traffic data from Waze within the clean interface of Google Maps.
  • johncalvinyoung 9y ago
    Definitely. I find myself using Waze primarily for that sort of hotspot detection, when I know all/almost all potential routes, but want to know how bad the best/worst case travel times are. If Waze reroutes me onto surface streets, best call in to my first meeting, that sort of thing.
• calvinbhai 9y ago
  As an Apple Maps hating, Waze fanboy with neutral opinion about Google Maps, I find this post fairly accurate. But, since iOS 11, I'm using Apple maps exclusively for navigation. Its UX is great, and the ETA is almost always accurate (unless there's some accident/road block not known to app). I use Waze whenever I'm on the highways, especially on those that I dont drive often. Google Maps is my go to option for places of interest, which is years ahead of Waze and Apple Maps. But some malls I visit have indoor maps on Apple Maps, and these are certainly better than google maps. edit: My app usage is mostly in the NE US, especially in NJ-NYC area.
  • Accacin 9y ago
    I'm the same, I'm quite new to iOS but I love the Maps app when it goes into a more birdseye view when you're coming up to a roudabout or other tricky areas, it's much easy to see which exit to take. Sometimes I have to use Google Maps when iOS maps can't find what I'm looking for which is the only real let down.
• sillypuddy 9y ago
  No data, but my suspicion is that Waze expects you to speed more. If Waze drivers on average are more aggresive, they're predictions might be accurately tuned for them.
  • Bedon292 9y ago
    That actually seems like quite a reasonable assumption. Knowing the normal speeds on the roads in my area, vs the speed limits, the difference in time between Google and Waze predictions seem to support that.
    • sgc 9y ago
      I think google maps learns from your driving habits and predicts accordingly. Just a hunch based on my personal experience.
• chipotle_coyote 9y ago
  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.
  • username223 9y ago
    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.
    • mseebach 9y ago
      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.
      • _carl_jung 9y ago
        > better horse I've been looking for a way to articulate this problem in A/B testing, thanks.
      • panarky 9y ago
        When hundreds of people try to ride the same horse at the same time, is it still better? That's what I call a "better horse paradox".
• Bedon292 9y ago
  I have no opinion on Apple Maps, as I haven't owned an iPhone since before it was available. However this, anecdotally, is definitely not my experience with Waze. Unless an accident happens (or additional traffic for some other random reason) on the route while I am on it, it is almost always perfect in its prediction. There are a few routes for me to take to and from work, and I check Waze every trip for which one I am going to take. I have learned to never argue with the route it takes me. Every time I take the 'Google' route instead of what Waze wants, I regret it because I end up sitting in an extra 10-15 minutes of traffic. Its also nice to be rerouted off of a road if an accident happens part way into the commute. I happen to be one of the fans of moving instead of sitting in traffic though, so that could also contribute. Its probably also worth noting, its 45-65 minutes each way, depending on start times. Perhaps the distance / time affects mine over the author. I might actually start a table of what it does for me now though, could be interesting to see.
• earth2mars 9y ago
  I guess the OP didn't account for updated directions based on traffic by Waze and Google. There goes accuracy of original prediction. Its fundamentally flawed study from that point of view.
• pmarreck 9y ago
  Waze has always been spot-on for me with its arrival predictions in the Northeast EXCEPT when wading into rush hours. Waze really needs to improve its future traffic estimation based on historical weekday/weekend trends/data. But the notification of speed traps, road hazards and traffic-light cameras pushes it to the fore IMHO.
• seany 9y ago
  Police locations is 100% worth the other minor annoyances of Waze.
• edejong 9y ago
  When I did analysis of hundreds of millions of predictions to analyze our prediction algorithm for trucks, I had a couple of metrics I would look at: MAE: mean absolute error: easy to understand metric. Given a stable system, this was my go-to standard. Bias: you put this one in. Generally, you want your predictions to be slightly pessimistic. RMSE: root mean square error. Most important one. Being 5 minutes off consistently is better than 30 minutes occasionally. Precision: larger trips can have larger errors. Here you divide your error by the predicted (or actual, or both) and then aggregate. Then obviously I would separate it into classes. Each 15 minute longer trip would have its own class. Highway vs suburb, region in the Netherlands, time of day and weekday.
  • draugadrotten 9y ago
    > RMSE: root mean square error. Most important one. Being 5 minutes off consistently is better than 30 minutes occasionally. This is essentially why I use waze: When there is an incident or other major block of a highway, the delays can easily be hours. With waze, I am routed around them. This have saved me catching a flight and arriving to a meeting in time on several occasions, as waze routing essentially is minimizing RMSE. Being 5% late eats into my safety margin, but when a trip takes 200% my estimated travel time it ruins my day.
• thomasfoster96 9y ago
  I don’t drive so I can’t say I’ve ever used Waze, but I did recently switch from Google Maps to Apple Maps. I’d say that the author’s findings about both apps largely mirrors my own experience using them for public transport and walking directions. Apple Maps generally always gives fairly conservative but accurate estimations of walking times, while Google Maps is all over the place. I’ve missed perhaps half a dozen buses while using Google Maps because of unrealistic walking times, but none while using Apple Maps. On the other hand, Google Maps has also sometimes overestimated walking times by ~20 minutes. As for using public transport, Apple Maps is just more useful. It’s easier to find stations, easier to find out about disruptions and gives better walking directions around stations. Google Maps regularly gets trains and buses mixed up, makes it a pain to find information about disruptions, and in a city with multiple modes of transport (i.e. Melbourne AU with trains, trams and buses) a cluster of train/bus/tram stations on a map just gets rendered as an unreadable mess. Google’s UI is also a bit of a pain. Several friends (both iOS and Android users) have complained that Google Maps is too fiddly to use on the go. I’d agree, and add that Apple Maps is a lot easier to use on a crowded train or while walking. That said, for a long time I persistently had problems with Apple Maps being slower to load actual maps. I suppose I’d better start collecting my own usage data and write a blog post.
• tibu 9y ago
  I'm using Waze because this is the one which knows about closures. I stopped using Google Maps and switched to Waze when Google took me to the 'quickest' empty route turned out to be empty because of a closure. I know nowadays Google already knows about this but only because of Waze. Google would be totally useless without Waze (and they know this).
  • treve 9y ago
    So, given that Google Maps now has this feature, what's your reason now?
• funktopus 9y ago
  Golden rule of driving with Waze: if it tells you to detour, you are taking the detour. That’s how we’ve discovered some of the coziest villages and most beautiful scenic routes.
• midnightdiesel 9y ago
  This is a nice analysis, explained well. The results seem to jive with the impressions I’ve heard about these apps. I wonder how other places compare to San Francisco, though? The variables involved with solving vehicle routes can differ a lot across locations. Probably ditto for the fitness of however each app is implemented.
• Fej 9y ago
  This might be right, but n is so small that the results are meaningless. This field is so complex and the variables innumerable that n = 40 per app cannot possibly result in trustworthy findings. I don't mean to disparage the author, this is really interesting and I'd love to know the answer, as well as many others here I imagine. I'm just not sure how to go about acquiring the data unless you're Google or Apple.
  • JorgeGT 9y ago
    It would help if instead of just the average the author plotted error bars with a measure of the deviation: standard deviation, coefficient of variation, etc. It may very well happen that the dispersion of the travel times is high enough to render fine differences in mean statistically meaningless.
• BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  I do not drive much (12k km per year) and this is 80% on roads I know. The remaining 20% is the road to vacation, usually with everyone in my region going to the same spots (this is in France). I am always wondering how good these apps are in such circumstances, when on a specific day everyone goes to the same place. They do not synchronize, which would help people to drive different roads from the start. Last Saturday I drove from Paris to the Alps, together with everybody else. GM was suggesting the straight road (A6) and I decided to take a completely different one (A5 via Annecy), supposedly 1h30 longer (over an official 7h30 trip). I arrived me of les at the same time as the others, with less stress (not one traffic jam). I would love to have an app which talks with the others to suggest an alternate road "because the others are PLANNING to take the obvious one"
  • londons_explore 9y ago
    Google predicts traffic in the future when deciding which route is best. That prediction will lead to users being spread across different routes.
    • BrandoElFollito 9y ago
      Ah? This is interesting and a very good thing - it may not be deployed everywhere, perhaps? I use mostly GM and the suggested road shows traffic being slow or fast "as we speak". The image, from the same place, will be vastly different at another time. And I see that in these times the road is different, avoiding the hot spots as of now. In other words: - at 5 in the morning it will route me through a busy town 500 km down the road because there is no traffic now. - at 17:00, from the same starting point, it will avoid the same city, because of high traffic. This high traffic is irrelevant to me as I will hit the town in 7 hours, when there will be nobody on the roads.
      • londons_explore 9y ago
        It's actually a complex one, and a constant source of user complaints. The coloring shown, and delay markers, are as the traffic is now. The actual route planning is done with data as the traffic is predicted to be.
• rcarmo 9y ago
  Interesting, but Apple Maps is still completely, utterly useless in Portugal (in both major cities, for any kind of trip), in Dublin (as a pedestrian) and in Madrid (as a commuter/pedestrian). It annoys me to no end that it is incapable of coping with local street addresses and keeps suggesting Brazilian ones (and I have my phone set to US English, including Siri). Also, no public transit info in most places I visited.
• Yizahi 9y ago
  The problem with Waze is a horrible UI. In frequent short commutes (in city basically) I need good UI to see road state, see important events, see comments for chosen important events, then plan a route and pick one out of several, when driving I want to clearly see junctions, I want to clearly see lane guidance etc. - most of these Waze fails. Google is about the same, only different. Much much better interface is in Yandex navigator made by russians, but due to war with them I can't really use it and have to suffer with W/G. And Apple is unavailable outside of their garden so I don't even consider it. Sygic doesn't have big adoption for traffic coverage, so is used offline only.
• paulbeattie 9y ago
  The one thing Google Maps is missing for me over the other two is speed limits. It's so handy to have an alert go off especially in larger cities where they can fluctuate frequently. Waze sometimes feels like it's taking you off the beaten path to improve data reliability and collection. I've had it take me off a quiet street onto a country lane only to emerge onto the same quiet street half a mile further along but having spent a significant period of time taking a weird route.
  • cup-of-tea 9y ago
    That's something that concerns me. You're not supposed to use these things as a driving aid. You should be paying attention to the road ahead, not relying on your phone to tell you how fast you should be driving. It's bad enough with people driving cars that do more and more stuff for you. Pilots are required to do a certain number of manual operations to make sure they are still able to do it. It's worrying to think about what kind of people are driving around on the roads.
    • greedo 9y ago
      In my experience, the number of signs indicating the speed limit is inversely related to the number of law enforcement officers enforcing that limit.
• imranshariff 9y ago
  Never know waze is so popular.
• rb666 9y ago
  I bought a new Tomtom kit recently after having used Waze and Google Maps for a couple years. I am glad I did, Tomtom has not been sitting still. Speed and interface have greatly improved and their guidance is still best in class. Same for the traffic and speedcam warnings. Not cheap, though...
  • philjohn 9y ago
    Their iOS app is fantastic as well, it's £18 per year but you get not only full updates during that time, international maps (download the ones you need before travelling, and no need to have data access whilst there), traffic updates and fixed and mobile speed camera data (with the ability to report a mobile speed camera when you see one). The other nice benefit, that Google has only recently added, is they have data about the speed limits on the road you're travelling on, which can be a godsend in certain circumstances.
  • Angostura 9y ago
    Their guidance is great, but I find the hardware horrible. I bought a top of the range model about 3 years ago and right from the start it was laggy. typing in an address and waiting for the letter to appear is just so silly for a company that controls the whole platform. I find Garmin UX to be much better, but their traffic system is worse.
    • rb666 9y ago
      Agree, that's why I waited for the 5200. It finally has a proper fast UI with search functionality close to what a phone can provide.
• cataflam 9y ago
  Great article, but the sample size is too small to draw strong conclusions from those time differences.
• danielbarla 9y ago
  My everyday use case for navigation is along the lines of having a buddy tell me to avoid a certain route, due to traffic. I've tried Google Maps and Waze (as well as Google's dashboard thing which keeps a semi-permanent time estimate pinned to some area on your phone), but these all miss the main point in my use case - I only need an detour away from my daily commute maybe twice a month. On the rest of the days, I know how to drive home, thanks. This is not enough for me to be semi-permanently firing up heavy apps to check the route. A simple thing which says "hey, I've noticed you just got in your car, and you're probably heading home - don't take highway X" would be nearly perfect.
  • zero_intp 9y ago
    Google Now, despite it's abandonware status, solves this use case by telling me when my commute has an incident.
    • danielbarla 9y ago
      Thanks for the tip, I will check it out. From a quick read, it still sounds like the information is a pull (from my perspective, so I'll have to keep checking it), rather than the app notifying me when traffic is horrible?
  • zimbatm 9y ago
    It's the same for weather apps. It would be cool to just get a notification when about to head out: "hey, you might want to take a scarf with you today, it's a bit chilly!"
    • yayb 9y ago
      Try Dark Sky. It has configurable alerts for bad weather etc. I get a daily prediction notification every morning a bit after I get up (to help choose what to wear), and as needed for bad weather.
  • Ambroos 9y ago
    Google Maps has commute updates. If you tell it what your commute is, on Android anyway, you'll get a discrete notification telling you how long the route home is, and a very quick summary of what route to take (for me it says either the name of the highway I take, or the name of the longest non-highway road on the alternative route). It works well and doesn't require you to actively check the complete route. If there are major incidents and your route home is much longer than usual, you should get a more visible notification.
• mdip 9y ago
  Glad to see that my anecdotal experience with Google Maps and Waze turned out to be correct[0]. I've noticed, consistently, that Waze underestimates the drive time that it quotes and I've also had the sneaking suspicion that the routes weren't perfect (though I had no expectation that they would be; there's a lot that can go wrong on a 40-minute without traffic commute). I think one of the reasons for Waze under-estimating route times has to do with it not properly correlating traffic speeds provided by its many users against the route selection. For instance, my route involves changing from a local highway that ends to an interstate where the left two lanes are the lanes you have to be in to get where I'm going. These lanes are often moving at around 5 MPH on average whereas the other side moves at around 60 MPH. Waze will indicate that the freeway is moving at an average of 40 MPH and will leave me on that road, rather than taking an easy, single-light traffic-free shorter route around the problem. I've never spent more than 5 minutes navigating the route-around, but I've had times where staying on has taken over 20 minutes (and 5 minutes would be fast most days). It rarely suggests the route-around (despite Waze having introduced it to me). It isn't intelligent enough to know that if I'm taking that exit, I'm the 5 MPH traffic, not the 60MPH traffic. It's either not taking into account that my route would result in slower traffic than average due to lane position, or it is and the other Wazers it's basing its estimates on are less conservative drivers than me -- I tend to get in the lane I need to be in early rather than flying around traffic and pushing my way in. It's got to be a really hard problem to solve, in general. Padding route estimates or estimating toward the worst-case scenario would probably be a good idea. That said, Waze is the only app that has actually hooked me into using it on every trip, every time. The Waze app gives me speed limits and warns me when I am exceeding them by a pre-set amount[1]. It's also pot-hole season where I live and due to the wide user base of Waze and its hazard reporting, I get a warning (well, lately, hundreds of warnings) when there's one up ahead. By far the biggest benefit, though, is the police warning. I don't intentionally speed; I generally subscribe to the rule of "keep up with traffic" while keeping to the right-most lanes[2]. That said, keeping up with traffic has gotten me pulled over once (no ticket due to a decade of not having a ticket and my only exceeding the speed limit by barely 10 MPH). In the last year, Waze has beaten me spotting the hidden police car every single time. I went on a 3-hour drive with a close friend who has one of those supposedly "covers everything" radar detectors and on that trip Waze spotted four more cops than his radar detector[3] did and had one partial false positive (he had moved ahead about a mile, so the app showed two cops instead of one) whereas his detector went off so many times in the city that he had to silence it. The avoidance of traffic fines and added insurance cost, alone, makes it worth it[4]. I'd say, for me, I started using the Waze app on the promise that it would get me around some of the unexpected traffic difficulties in my daily commute, but the reality is that after a few months, I know the areas involving my commute far better than Waze or Google. Both navigation apps have made me a slightly more intelligent driver. I'd often skip-off the freeway for surface streets when things got slow and was surprised when navigation apps wouldn't suggest to me to do that. It turns out that the time spent at traffic lights in traffic well exceed a slow freeway. It feels faster, sometimes, to exit the wall-to-wall 15 MPH slog, but you trade it for periods of 40 MPH traffic mixed with longer periods of just sitting idle. But the bigger eye-opener that Waze seemed to do, which Google Maps didn't -- when there were lane closures, it'd have me enter the freeway at the first on-ramp before the lanes re-opened, rather than at some point after the lanes re-opened. And every time I ignored it, I ended up in some creative form of traffic hell. After thinking it through, I realized that the first on-ramp after traffic re-opens is often flooded with everyone else who's trying to avoid the construction. The last on-ramp just before the lanes re-open is not similarly flooded and yet traffic on the freeway is moving at about 60% of the speed-limit at that point and only getting faster as it reaches the re-opening. Since the last merge bottle-neck is that on-ramp and it's not clobbered with diversion traffic, it's a very good workaround. [0] I don't own Apple products, so these are the two "big choices" on Android. [1] I bumped it up from warning at the actual speed limit because driving the speed limit on some of the roads I travel is more likely to cause death-by-someone-elses-road-rage. [2] Where I live, two-lane roads require drivers to remain in the right lane and use the left lane for passing and this rule is enforced ... just about never. Multi-lane roads are fair game with most remaining in the middle one or two lanes for the entire duration. I'm not even sure what the law is for these but if I were to judge based on how 90% of people drive, I'd say the law is to never be in the right lane, and that the left lane is for people traveling more than 20 MPH over the speed limit. We have no HOV lanes. [3] I can't write that without thinking Radar Detector Detector Detector Detector https://rationalconspiracy.com/2016/06/02/radar-detector-detector-detector-detector-almost-certainly-a-hoax/ https://rationalconspiracy.com/2016/06/02/radar-detector-det... [4] "Well, you can avoid that by just not breaking the law." Except that traffic laws are among the few laws that are easily broken unintentionally.
• khana 9y ago
  Apple maps.
• hmhrex 9y ago
  My main problem with this study is that it's only in the Bay Area. I live in Ohio, and I've actually found Waze to be MUCH better. I tend to be at my destination before my estimated time, unlike what this article describes. This may have to do with several factors though: Less traffic density, less people using Waze, etc.
• mwexler 9y ago
  As much as I love these apps, I do worry about municipalities fighting back. For example, https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/25/new-jersey-town-will-close-streets-to-fight-navigation-apps/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/25/new-jersey-town-will-clo... describes the efforts a town in NJ made to force these apps to not send cars into their streets to avoid jams.
  • Shivetya 9y ago
    well then drones will make up for it. of course that will lead to all new sorts of rules. finally it could come down to requiring towns to provide the maps and detail
• ooajim 9y ago
  Does anyone outside the US and maybe the UK find any maps comparable to Google Maps? They are (Waze, Apple Maps, OpenStreet Maps) a step behind Google Maps, maybe with only exception being Yandex Maps.
  • ianmurrays 9y ago
    Waze has more up-to-date maps than Google Maps in Chile, at least in my experience.
• Aoyagi 9y ago
  Well, too bad they didn't include HERE and especially TomTom... The selection they have is just a bunch of products whose purpose is to provide advertising and harvest data.
  • mi100hael 9y ago
    Apple is a hardware company that doesn't provide advertising. And I wouldn't buy a TomTom GPS these days... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16257811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16257811
    • Aoyagi 9y ago
      Well in Apple's case, it's more of a "how do we keep people in our walled garden"... I wouldn't buy a TomTom device either, because I've got it in my phone and that's what I was talking about.
• forgotmypw 9y ago
  I used to swear by Waze, proselytizing to anyone who would listen, and otherwise. There are two main reasons I stopped using it altogether. 1) As tends to happen with our favorite apps, they started fucking with the UI. I don't remember exactly what it was at this point, but every release after Google's acquisition included some changes that made it less convenient and more aggravating. 2) I gave up having tower service and went wifi-only. Google Maps is very good at storing the map offline and recalculating without an Internet connection. Waze needs an internet connection every time a fly passes between you and the GPS satellite. I still miss the police warnings, but I also changed my driving habits to where I don't need them anymore.
  • ctdonath 9y ago
    I still miss the police warnings, but I also changed my driving habits to where I don't need them anymore. Hey, that's an idea: obey the law. [ETA: funny that this is being downvotes.]
    • Humdeee 9y ago
      Is it? Snarky and obvious comments generally will attract down votes. Those kind of comments become tiresome and dilute a discussion.
      • kimdcmason 9y ago
        It didn't strike me as snarky at all, and it's also not obvious considering that many people want the police warnings so that they can break the law. Apparently complying with laws is seen as optional by a lot of folks, and the result is mass deaths and injury. Police and red light camera warnings in Waze always struck me as both encouragement and enablement of deliberate law breaking.
        • andrewmcwatters 9y ago
          Yep, and there's a whole market for radar detection. It's basically an unethical software feature.
• more111 9y ago
  This article is taking the estimated arrival time into account, but not sudden external influences like accidents or traffic jams. I’ve used Waze in São Paulo, throughout the UK and Germany, and find it to be very creative concerning route finding. In the same situations, Google Or Apple maps seem much more conservative and consider “riding out” the traffic jams instead of taking nifty shortcuts. Especially in São Paulo, that was a HUGE time saver. Another feature I prefer with Waze is integrated speed limit display. I never had to endure any ads though in Waze, that’d be a reason to quit and switch.
  • JoshuaEddy 9y ago
    Was it really a time saver or did it just feel like a time saver? In the US I found Waze unrealistically optimistic that back-roads and alternative routes would save time -- my ETA started great, but slowly worsened until I was better off riding out the traffic.
    • Retric 9y ago
      Yea, I suspect they have a significant bias as suggesting you stay in heavy traffic makes it seem like the App is useless.
• sp00ls 9y ago
  He totally missed the main reason most people use Waze. Crowd sourced speed trap locator.
  • manuu80 9y ago
    I hate waze, but I hate even more to get speed fines. So, Radar warnings is the only reason it made me switch from my old garmin gps. Google maps, on the opposite, fills all the boxes that I like, but not the one that I need.
  • kawfey 9y ago
    I've been listening to a CB radio and comparing it to waze during my commute, and CB radio is still arguably superior in avoiding speed traps and wrecks. Truckers use waze a lot but still always default to radio for real-time traffic information. It's also ridiculously annoying when a trucker gets into an on-air fight with another trucker, or when one catcalls an attractive woman, or when a megawatt CB broadcaster from Mexico or the Deep South USA comes in full scale spouting literal gibberish.
• fwilliams 9y ago
  I think the conclusion in the article is too strong given the experiments and the data. Estimating average error over a small number trips is misleading. We don't know how the error distribution varies with time, destination, departure location, traffic conditions, etc... Also the 120 trips are definitely biased to the usual routes the author and his wife take regularly. It doesn't seem reasonable to draw general conclusions from what is presented in this article.
  • hartator 9y ago
    Do you know a better benchmark?
    • fwilliams 9y ago
      You could certainly come up with something better than this. At the very least for such a comparison to be generalizable, the raw data should be a set of timed routes, app estimates, and traffic/weather conditions. Given this information, you can extract similar routes and do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to extract general facts, you can group routes by certain attributes that you care about (e.g. high traffic areas, time of day, etc...) and do an error analysis. But all that is beyond the point of my original comment, which states that the "benchmark" the author uses likely does not generalize to very well for the following reasons: * The distribution of all possible routes is large and depends on many variables that I mentioned (traffic, weather, location, etc...). The author's sample of this distribution is tiny and biased towards routes frequently taken by him and his wife. You could probably choose a different 120 routes and compute completely different results. * Averages can be misleading if you don't know the underlying distribution you are sampling from. As a trivial example, the average value of a set of samples from a Bernoulli distribution with p=0.5 is 0.5 even though all the samples are either 0 or 1. In this case, the average is not a good tool to summarize the data (unless you know it's a Bernoulli distribution). So even if the author had used a million routes, simply taking the average error doesn't say anything meaningful about the error without also understanding the error distribution. So I think the data and methodology presented in the article are not sufficient to draw any general conclusions about how good the error estimates are in each app.
• throw7 9y ago
  The feature I miss is designing a route, saving it, then having turn-by-turn navigation guide me through the route.
• acrooks 9y ago
  I love the data of Waze, the UX of Google Maps and the iOS integration of Apple Maps. If only we could have all three benefits out of one solution.
• virtualritz 9y ago
  I can not second these findings for European cities I regularly drive in myself: Berlin, Milan, Paris, London and Rome. I don't know about Apple but Google at least always tries to route using functional class (FC) 1 & 2 roads. Waze uses whatever. For European cities this makes a huge difference; particularly during rush hours. Waze also routes me around traffic lights using FC >2 roads. I've never seen Google do that. On a side note: Every Uber I took in 2016, 2017 & 2018 in the aforementioned cities, plus Belgrade and Warshaw, was using Waze.
• vagab0nd 9y ago
  In Google Maps Navigation, there used to be a "dim screen between turns" option. Anyone knows where it went? Not sure why they took it away. Seems to be a pretty useful feature.
  • flyinghamster 9y ago
    I miss the +/- zoom buttons, and having Google Maps respect my zoom level when I hit the "center map" button.
• TheAdamist 9y ago
  Waze has settings to output to the phone speaker, instead of bluetooth, even when its connected to the car via bluetooth. My stereo doesn't autoswitch to bluetooth when directions come in, only on phone calls, so unless i want to hear dead air 99% of the time, i dont get directions from google maps which doesn't have such an override.
  • tacomonstrous 9y ago
    Google Maps has the same setting, at least on Android.
• thinking_errol 9y ago
  Great job, Jonathan! Can't agree more about Waze's creative (and overly optimistic!) guidance and Google's general all-roundedness. Tell y'all a story, but take it with a bunch of salt because I generally resist updating apps and even OS until they stop working, for all the UI "improvements". Every year, entire Munich traffic grinds to a halt once the first 5 snowflakes hit the ground. I guess the drivers of expensive German cars must be rather afraid to bump their precious new bumpers. Anyway, this is use-case #1 for Waze. It will guide you past the traffic using all nooks and crannies, and one-lane farmer's roads around town. Use-case #2 is reports of accidents AKA traffic police, who will block a major artery for any imaginable reason, past present or future, and for as long as they god damn please. Now Google, great-and-all. One winter I drove to the nearby mountainous region of Czech Republic, before the EU anti-roaming-fee-law, so I whipped out my corporate phone with super strict mandatory software update policy. I thought I knew Google Maps so I followed the guidance with complete confidence. Half hour into the Republic, the icy serpentine road gets worse by the kilometer, but my SUV would surely handle that as long as I'm patient and careful. Next thing I know, my destination's on the right! But it's only a stop-over and the blue line goes ALL THE WAY BACK the dangerous, unsalted and completely unnecessary road, adding an hour of grief to the already delayed getting-there. I swear I never touched the screen to agree to stop over at that restaurant, the suggestion must have either confirmed itself upon a timeout or the touchscreen must have bumped against something in the compartment under the windshield. And I never heard about Google Maps making suggestions in the middle of a trip anyway. This was the last time I used an up-to-date Google Maps, the old version's just fine, thank you very much. The newer one could have killed my whole family that night. Alright, I don't hate Google or Munich or even the local police quite as much as I might sound like. Ads are broken though, which means a huge potential for distraction-free marketing.
• kschua 9y ago
  I have been using Waze for a couple of years and I turn it on for the same route to get my daughter to school in the morning and back home through traffic. Recently, their routing algorithm has gotten so bad that I am on the verge of discarding it and probably try HERE maps. The issues are 1) There was a railroad removal which block the road for several weeks. Waze didn't detect it and I arrived about 15 minutes later. I went home and tried to edit the map and to my surprise, I couldn't do it now whereas I was able to edit the maps once upon a time. 2) Recently, it has routed me to another supposed faster route to my daughter's school. I took that route once and we were late for school. From then on, I took the route which I am familiar with (which incidentally was what Waze had always been showing me till recently) and I keep seeing the ETA dropping. The ETA for the my regular route is about 5 minutes faster than the new Waze suggested route which is about 35 minutes
• DrJosiah 9y ago
  archive.is has the article for those coming late and see that it's password protected.
  • Imagenuity 9y ago
    http://archive.is/mg5oU http://archive.is/mg5oU
• bthis 9y ago
  +++Waze has better traffic detection and alternate routing than GM and AM, in my opinion, which is the reason I use it over them. --Waze needs a way to mark your parking spot any time you arrive anywhere. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not, like when you stop somewhere other than the routed destination. +++The arrival time estimate is excellent. --The pop-up ads are TRULY OBNOXIOUS and basically stupid as others have pointed out. +++The police AND STOPLIGHT CAMERA warnings are helpful. --The ride sharing button is way too prominent and a waste of valuable UI territory. --The hazard reporting requires too many clicks. I just noticed the "OK WAZE" feature and haven't had a chance to use it yet. +++The alternate routing view, with the ability to see multiple alternate routes and their estimated trip times is excellent, too.