Use of alternate city names for routing
Several years ago the decision was made to use the postal city as an alternate city name for routing to addresses in rural areas. According to Wazeopedia "Waze founder and CTO Ehud stated in a US meetup that a search algorithm is so much work to build correctly and maintain, that Waze does not want to spend the time, money or energy to build their own, and are happy to stack the Waze matching process on top of the Google search algorithm." As a result, WME editors have spent untold time and energy adding the postal cities to these segments. There are literally hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of segments that still don't have don't have the postal cities added and this results in thousands of "Incorrect Address" URs that editors have to spend even more time and energy fixing. At the current rate, it will take many years to add postal cities to the segments that do not yet have them. Does Waze staff still believe this is the best solution? Are there plans to increase collaboration with Google to rectify the discrepancies between our addresses and theirs?
Anonymous
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pasciakd - NJ NY - AM commented
Bump - Even with an alternate city on a road segment, the search doesn't work right
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Bob McCormick commented
I think this may be better described as a search issue and not really something to do with routing.
Also know that the rural address guidance is a somewhat regional issue in the US. For example, in New England we don't really have unincorporated areas that would follow guidance where the primary city may be blank and the alternate city is the USPS name.
We do have situations though where the USPS name may be different than the city, and USPS names do not necessarily align with municipal boundaries. In VT a lot of USPS names bleed over town lines.
I believe the real issue at hand is how Waze search is working. I would hope that whenever Waze finds a Waze address (that was placed by an editor and not some automated process) it would take priority over everything else -- and that should include searches against all pri and alt streets and cities.
As for the accuracy of Google Maps addresses, in VT we do have lots of scenarios where the GM address locations (passed back to Waze) are incorrect. In some cases it is apparent that the locations are the centroids of property parcels, which may be significantly different than the start of a driveway. This sometimes results in Waze routing to a location that's on the other side of a stream or even hill from where the destination should be, especially for larger parcels.
Google Maps also has a lot of erroneous street info in VT - incorrect names, incorrect placement, etc. We are nearing the end of a project to ensure Waze has every E911 street in VT correctly mapped in WME - when that's done Waze will more accurately reflect the state's roads than Google Maps. I'm sure that's the exception and probably GM for most places has a better representation of accuracy (especially in rural areas) than WME.
W1QA