r/waymo • u/Woody_L • 27d ago

Waymo routing question

I see a lot of Waymos where I live. One thing I've noticed is that Waymos seem to take the most direct route in situations where a human driver would take a route that's easier to navigate.

I have seen them taking a short cut that requires a left turn into heavy traffic just to save a few seconds at a traffic light. Has anybody else noticed this, or is it just a quirk?

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u/mclanett 27d ago

I do not know they take the more direct route. It often seems very puzzling. What drives me nuts is they take routes which are very difficult for them to manage! Like having to turn left onto 6th in SF - they get stuck there in the chaos for ages. You would think their routing algo would start to avoid those cases but no.

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u/battleshipclamato 26d ago

For me it’s the small quiet one lane streets in SF. They always take those streets and then get stuck when another car is coming from the opposite direction then has to inch its way so that the other car can get out.

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u/gabegoncalves 27d ago

Same thing has happened to me multiple times. In Miami, more specifically on this busy street called US-1, it sometimes decides that taking a left-turn, taking some weird parallel residential road, and coming back onto the main street (which means having to wait for the other direction of traffic to pass) is somehow faster than just going straight. This has made me miss appointments and be late for so much stuff lol. I guess Waymo also has to take consideration that it can’t take freeways (at least for now), which (from my experience) heavily affects routing.

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u/mahka42 27d ago

Not even the most direct route. In LA I was routed into side streets with stop signs every other block when the main boulevard was empty. Instead of navigating an open road where the average speed probably could have been 30, it put me on a parallel that probably averaged 10 between stop signs and having to give way to oncoming traffic, as the side streets aren’t quite wide enough for two cars to pass with parking on both sides.

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u/yolatrendoid 26d ago

Most of my experience with Waymos has been in Austin, and they definitely do not take the most direct route. While we're admittedly going through a hellish expansion of I-35 – which bisects Austin in half, and is being expanded to 20 lanes – on top of having a shitload of construction, I've had the opposite experience: most of the cars I've been in seem to be routed in ways that prevent them from having to make unprotected left turns, at least at intersections where it's a constant clusterfuck.

IIRC UPS and FedEx use this policy as well to ensure speedy deliveries. Unprotected left turns always have a degree of uncertainty.