Toll Discussion View history

Waze has the ability to flag toll roads, to assist in providing better information and routing options to users.

Toll road effects

There are two effect of flagging a road on the map as containing a toll:

1. Routes that traverse that segment will show a toll icon on the preview screen to alert drivers that this route will include tolls.
2. When the client option to avoid tolls is enabled, a routing penalty is added to the route every single segment along the route marked a toll.
   • This means that any segment with a toll flag will be avoided if at all reasonably possible.

     NOTE: The toll penalty is very high, and the definition here of reasonable may seem extreme. The routing engine will prefer a significant detour to avoid a toll, but not one it considers to be insane or impossible. The exact threshold of the routing engines "insanity check" is proprietary information, and not published by Waze.

   • This also means that given two route options the routing engine will choose the one with the fewest number of tolled segments, regardless of if they are consecutive or not.

Which segments should be flagged as toll

The configuration used is designed to work well when a route must, or a driver chooses to use (a portion of) the toll road, and they have the avoid tolls option enabled.

Every segment (entrance/exit/hwy) which actually traverses through a toll booth, collection point, or ticket dispenser is marked as toll per current wiki guideline. This means that no matter what path you take to get through the tool location you only traverse a single toll segment per toll location, and are only assessed with a single toll penalty. This may mean that only a single segment is tolled, or if there are parallel segments going through the toll location (eg E & W ramps, a single segment of each path is tolled).

Benefits of using this method

There are a few benefits to this overall method of applying the toll flag, as opposed to the old method of marking every segment of a tolled road with the flag.

• It allows the routing engine to pick a route with fewest numbers of tolls along the route.
• It will apply an identical penalty to two different tolled roads (assuming they both have one toll collection point) regardless of how many segments the tolled road is made of. This allows two tolled bridges and/or tunnels to the same destination to be treated equally, and allow the routing engine to pick the most appropriate one for your route regardless of their individual segment count.
• It will simultaneously solve the "I was routed through the rest area" URs since the hwy segments parallel to the rest areas won't be tolled and penalized anymore, therefore the rest areas will stop being favored.