So... Waze is now a useless waste of space on my phone...

[Sarcany]

After the latest update, Waze now directs most of my address-searches in the nearest city to the most expensive private parking garage within several blocks of the destination address instead of to the address that I requested.

Not interested in paying extravagant parking fees, suffering the inevitable dents and scratches from a reckless valet and walking a half-mile when I could just park at the metered spot in front of my destination or the self-park garage in the building -- if I could get good directions to the door.

...Apparently, they made a deal with Atlantic Parking to divert drivers to their most expensive properties. The search results now show a URL and phone number with an option to reserve a spot for a fee. When I scroll down for more info, I see that the "results" were added by wazeparking1.

There is no way to navigate to a street address when there is an expensive parking garage within a half mile. It always directs to the parking garage.

[testcase]

Have you tried Google Maps on your iPhone? Free to use and, when I use it, brings me to whatever address I’ve entered.

[Carm]

I never really used Waze to find addresses. Just for traffic/police/objects on road. And for that, it worked just fine. I know it’s an all in one solution, but I just have it running in the background.

That’s unfortunate though.

[space-time]

I usually do not update Apps because changes like this. I have seen so many Apps go bad that I am disgusted. I would rather buy Waze for a couple of bucks and it would be fine with me if I had to buy a subscription every year for a couple of bucks, if it removed all ads, and it would work on all my family phones.

[mattkime]

I haven't seen this problem but i haven't been in larger cities either.

[graylocks]

maybe you're in a test market. it's not happening in the Atlanta area. i can't imagine there wouldn't be some kind of Parking setting you could opt out of. pretty stupid for there not to be one.

[Sarcany]

graylocks wrote:
maybe you're in a test market. it's not happening in the Atlanta area. i can't imagine there wouldn't be some kind of Parking setting you could opt out of. pretty stupid for there not to be one.

I've gone through all the settings. No way to disable it.

It almost made me very very late for an appointment this morning. Would have sent me up a one-way street to a parking garage that I couldn't even get into because the entrance was on the other side of a median and then would have had to drive about 10 blocks by way of other one-way streets to get back to my destination. In rush hour traffic.

Luckily, I saw the problem ahead of time and I was able to park on the street a couple of blocks down. Made it on time.

...I've tried Google Maps in the past, but the live-traffic re-routing in Waze was far superior.

Waze can't be relied upon to navigate accurately to my destination, so I guess I'll see if Google Maps has improved.

...This is insane: The job of a navigation app is to accurately guide you to your destination, not to some arbitrary spot several blocks away. Whoever approved this change should be fired and never be allowed to work in that kind of business again.

...

Starting to see how they fudged it. The parking garage is associated with multiple street addresses. When I search for an address, the garage comes up as the tenant and somebody ("wazparking1" or "subs5" by the creator and updater notes) changed the map to indicate that the building-entrance is actually the parking garage entrance several blocks away.

...

...Just checked: Google Maps does at least show me the accurate destination instead of directing me to a garage. I'll try it for awhile.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

I will agree that Waze has been less reliable in the last few months. I posted some bad problems after a bad update a few months ago but they were mostly eliminated after the next update.

I haven't seen the parking issues, but I haven't had any destinations near any pay-to-park locations in the last two weeks.

If you are a user of their forums, it's one of the best places to complain.

[graylocks]

i definitely recommend sending them strident feedback on this change.

[mikebw]

Carm wrote:
I never really used Waze to find addresses. Just for traffic/police/objects on road. And for that, it worked just fine. I know it’s an all in one solution, but I just have it running in the background.

That’s unfortunate though.

Google navigation has saved me more than a few bucks by alerting to speed traps ahead.