Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war
As a Waze user, this has actually been a source of increasing frustration for me.<p>I do not want to save 1-3 minutes on a commute by cutting through unfamiliar residential areas where deaf kids play and homeowners give me dirty looks as I go over their oversized speed bumps.<p>I use Waze not so much as a super-optimal routing tool, but as an aggravation-avoidance tool.  Traffic and speed-traps aggravate me, sure... but not nearly so much as trying to make a blind left from a stop sign at the top of a hill in my manual transmission.<p>Just yesterday I was in a somewhat unfamiliar area during crazy rainstorms near NYC... I used Waze since who knows what traffic looks like in those conditions.<p>In order to avoid 20-30 seconds of waiting at a traffic light it routed me to the next street over to make the left turn... which was on a curve with lots of parked cars and, in that weather, made it impossible to see if anyone was coming.  If it hadn&#x27;t been a one-way street I&#x27;d have considered turning around and going back to the light... but instead I used my best judgement and BARELY avoided getting nailed by another car.<p>Waze is great technology, but is still pretty naive about solving the problem I want solved.  All the aggregated minutes of driving it has saved me over the last couple years would not have been worth it if yesterday&#x27;s single poor routing decision had ended with me in the hospital&#x2F;dead and&#x2F;or my car totaled.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;