Detour Prevention Mechanisms

Waze routing includes a mechanism to prevent routing off a highway/freeway only to be routed right back on the same highway/freeway. The assumption is that drivers will prefer to remain on the highway/freeway even if waze calculates that taking a series of ramps or other collector/distributor roads is slightly faster or shorter.

Waze routing will not present routes over a detour off a highway/freeway and back on that same highway/freeway when each of the following conditions are met:

1. the last segment on the highway/freeway before the detour has the same street name and same city name as the next highway/freeway segment after the detour (the segments are considered to have the same name if either the primary name or alternate names are the same, unnamed segments are not considered as having the same name),
2. the detour is more than one segment long, and
3. the detour is under the threshold length as defined below.

Road Type	Threshold
Freeway	5km
Major Highway	5km
Minor Highway	500m