All of a sudden: Waze Carpool

[BobAbooey]

Hey folks. I am a senior beta tester for Waze. I have direct contact with the developers, engineers and meet with them yearly. Most of them live in israel, so lots of google hangout meetings.

If you guys have questions or have bugs/ideas you would like me to mention to the Waze team, let me know.

I was with the lead PM for waze carpool last year on the day it went live. They had some technical issues and it was fun to help him and his team out while i was there...

I'm a big user of waze, #34 on the scoreboard from driving not editing points. Ask them if they could make a setting to turn off carpool. I'm aways swiping to the left by accident and having to see that carpool screen. Its a little silly because I'm sure like only a very small # of waze users will ever use that option. Thanks...

 

[tpatana]

I've checked the riders occasionally but I've never seen anything that matches my commute close enough to make it worth it.

 

[Mokuzai]

If you guys have questions or have bugs/ideas you would like me to mention to the Waze team, let me know.

Awesome of you to offer. I've reached out to support a few times but I have no idea if it actually gets to the devs.

My feedback would be around regular riders and setting up/editing rides. They added a function that lets me schedule the entire week's worth of rides all at once which is great but I find that I can't really use it. Here are some of my ideas for improvement:

• If I use the feature to schedule the entire week's rides, the responses come back one at a time. Not sure what the rider interface is like but there should be a way to accept all at once and not send a separate notification per ride.
• Editing the pick up and drop off points do not work with the feature to schedule the entire week's rides.

Speaking of editing pickup and dropoff points:

• I wish it were "smarter" with pick up and drop off points. If I'm editing every ride with the same person to the exact same pickup/dropoff points every day why can it not remember that is where we meet?
• The suggested pickup/dropoff point is often very inconvenient for the rider. I'm not about to make them walk a ways when I could just drive closer.
• When editing these points, it gives a 950ft radius that you can choose a new location within. Often times the desired location is outside the circle. So I end up moving the point to the edge of the circle, tap save then edit it again which gives me a new circle. It can take 4-5 edits sometimes to edit one point by "walking" the circle over to where we meet. Not sure what the purpose of the circle is if you can just bypass it, so it just ends up being a nuisance.
• We could of course just ignore all this editing and just meet at our spot but then the nav is annoying trying to constantly re-route to the inconvenient meeting location.

Some bugs that I have noticed:

• When editing a ride and starting with editing the pickup spot, as soon as the pickup spot is changed and saved the dropoff spot moves to some random new location. So even if the dropoff was fine I'll have to go edit the dropoff after moving the pickup since it moves itself. This also happens if you start with the dropoff point it'll randomly move the pickup spot.
• I've observed that if I start the ride from home on WiFi it will sometimes have trouble finding/starting the route (though sometimes this can happen when my phone has just connected to LTE from being underground), and if it does start the route it'll often not notify the rider that I'm on the way even though my route turns green (sharing). To combat this I typically don't open the app until I've driven a bit from the house but I would rather not be trying to fiddle with the app while driving.

All the above has been experienced on my previous iPhone 6+ and my current iPhone XS Max.

Be happy to discuss and elaborate if necessary. Thanks for your help!

 

[SpudLime]

i copy/pasted your post and sent it to the PM.

 

[Mokuzai]

i copy/pasted your post and sent it to the PM.

Thanks! So the last two rides since writing up all of that had some problems, some of which I mentioned but I'll try and go through what the experience was while it is still fresh.

Ride home yesterday, left work and started towards the pickup spot. After noticing the phone was solidly on LTE after leaving the parking garage I opened the waze app. Since there was a ride scheduled the whole screen gets taken over by the carpool notification to start the ride with a big green button. Tap the button and can see the button visually press...and nothing. Tap a few more times and nothing. Close the app, restart the app. This time the carpool screen doesn't take over but there's a banner at the top. Tap that to bring the screen with the green button. Tap a few times and nothing. Close and re-open app and finally am able to get the green button to take. All of this is going on while driving towards my destination which is taking my attention from the road. This tapping with no result has happened before but forgot to mention it in my last write up.

Ride to work this morning, drive a bit away from the house and wait for the phone to be solidly on LTE. Open the waze app, presented with the green button, press it and I get the spinning wheel. After a while it just gives up and I get the banner at the top to start the carpool. Tap the banner and try the green button again. After spinning a bit it finally starts up, turns my route green and all is good. Or so I thought...get all the way to the destination to find I have messages from my rider asking if I'm on my way. Tapping on the banner to "start" the carpool (the banner always says start no matter what stage you're in) and I see the green button says start, not that I've arrived or anything. So I tap start again and the whole ride starts over navigating me to the destination, which is across the street at this point...no option that I've arrived. Try again...same result. Shut down the app and restart it, tap start carpool again and after it starts the whole ride over again it finally switches to the I've arrived button.

There was a waze update this morning so the app was updated in between these two rides.

 

[Runebane]

@SpudLime I decided to check out the carpool feature and signed up as a driver. My complaint/bug/issue whatever is that after it asks what time I leave for work and get to work, it assumes being a half hour late to work is cool. Seriously? I had to edit the times after the fact to correct this. Either they need to rephrase their questions about when I leave and get to work, or realize that people will get fired for being a half hour late to work and not make that the default.

/edit it also thinks I can leave a half hour early from work. I forgot to put that in as well, thus the edit.

Other than that, I'm still checking it out. Haven't had anyone request my long arse commute yet

 

[Mokuzai]

Haven't had anyone request my long arse commute yet

As a driver I've always had better luck searching for riders and offering.

 

[bijan]

While that may be what they are saying for people to be paying $9+ dollars for a ride to or from work is kind of expensive and definitely money Uber or Lyft could be getting as well. Doesn't matter the final destination the person/s are going. If someone didn't have a car that day, let's say in the shop, and the person needed to get to work, they'd normal call for an Uber or Lyft.

I'm in Canada so don't know Uber prices in the US, but my commute is 15 miles and takes me about 20-30 minutes. The Uber would cost $34 in non-rush hour. It's a $7.75 uber ride to the mall I walk to every other day (about 20 minutes walking) to get food from the food court... So this is definitely way way cheaper than Uber/Lyft.

 

[SpudLime]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Im trying to get the Carpool PM to check out this thread. Not sure if he will. They tend to not look too much on forums. They rely on the huge beta test group (around 2000 ios, around 3000 on android...) may be more than that now.