The Waze platform is based on metric units and each Waze application (WME and the client app) translates that into imperial units as required. Both display interfaces have a loss of accuracy in the displayed segment length due to rounding.
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The following information is only focused on the WME application and will not be covering the impact on the client app. |
Overview
All Waze segment length information is based on metric unit measurements.
When a user selects the metric unit measurement system from WME, the interface displays a whole metric unit rounded (up or down), not truncated.
When a user selects the imperial unit measurement system from WME, the interface simply translates the already rounded metric units as imperial units. WME displays two decimal places of accuracy for the translation from the rounded numbers, giving a false sense of precision.
Metric precision and rounding
The internal units are stored with an accuracy of 0.01 meters (0.0328 ft) or about 3/8-inch accuracy. However, the displayed units will be rounded up or down as needed to produce only whole meters. When the segment length reaches more than 999 meters, it switches to kilometers and changes the precision to 0.01 km (or 10 m). This means, you might nudge the end of a segment slightly, but the displayed length may not change if the nudge was inside of the 10 meter range of the kilometer display.
The meters displayed are rounded to the nearest whole number, with a minimum savable segment size of 1 meter (3.28 feet). Drawing or shrinking a segment any shorter than that will result in a save error. Segments shorter than 19.69 ft (6 m) will not accurately track speed data and should be avoided. See this discussion on minimum segment length for more information.
Meters are rounded with the following formula:
Interger( TrueSegmentLength + 0.5 )
This results in the following:
| Meters | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| True length (m) | Formula Steps | Displayed result (m) | |
| 4.49 | Interger(4.49 + 0.5) | Interger(4.99) | 4 |
| 4.50 | Interger(4.5 + 0.5) | Interger(5.0) | 5 |
| 4.99 | Interger(4.99 + 0.5) | Interger(5.49) | 5 |
| 5.00 | Interger(5 + 0.5) | Interger(5.5) | 5 |
| 5.49 | Interger(5.49 + 0.5) | Interger(5.99) | 5 |
| 5.50 | Interger(5.5 + 0.5) | Interger(6.0) | 6 |
The formula for the kilometer range is more complex. Note the precision is still based on the 2 decimal places for the meters:
Int( ( ( TrueSegmentLength + 0.5 ) / 10 ) / 100- Int = Interger
This results in the following:
| Kilometers | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| True length (m) | Formula Steps | Displayed result (km) | |||
| 1004.99 | Int( ( 1004.99 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1009.99 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 100.999 ) / 100 | 100 / 100 | 1.00 |
| 1005.00 | Int( ( 1005 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1010 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 101 ) / 100 | 101 / 100 | 1.01 |
| 1009.99 | Int( ( 1009.99 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1014.99 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 101.499 ) / 100 | 101 / 100 | 1.01 |
| 1010.00 | Int( ( 1010 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1015 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 101.5 ) / 100 | 101 / 100 | 1.01 |
| 1014.99 | Int( ( 1014.99 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1019.99 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 101.999 ) / 100 | 101 / 100 | 1.01 |
| 1015.00 | Int( ( 1015 + 5 ) / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 1020 / 10 ) / 100 | Int( 102 ) / 100 | 102 / 100 | 1.02 |
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Drawing of the reality of segment lengths compared to the stepped output of the whole numbers including the rounding. |
Imperial precision and rounding
When changing the WME display to Imperial, there is no change to the underlying segment unit value. The WME interface simply translates all the metric displayed values into the equivalent imperial values out to two decimal places.
MORE HERE EXPLAINING THE TRANSLATION
Custom precision script for WME
Users in the Waze editing community have developed scripts that can be loaded into the browser to enable additional functionality not available in the basic WME available from Waze. One such script is the WME True Segment Length. This script will display the true length of the segment in both metric and imperial units with two decimal places of accuracy.