I hadn't used Waze in a while but used it twice in the last month. Seems like no one uses it anymore, and it was 2/2 in leading me down a bad, more time consuming path.
I very rarely take Waze's advice about alternate routes after being burned a few times, and I have learned to expect that it's ETA prediction will always be optimistic by about 15-20 minutes in my case. I mostly use it to pick between a few well-known ways to/from work and to get more traffic data than Google Maps will show.
The most infuriating thing about Waze is when you hit traffic that it already knew about but only then does it add 5-10 minutes in delay time.
Last I used it was a good four years back and it tried to make me take left turns from a small alley into a major high at during rush hour in la. Ended up costing me more time than if I just hopped on the main road to begin with.
Google Maps has gotten pretty obnoxious about this lately too.
LA rush hour is bad enough with crowded enough side streets now that the way to outsmart it in my experience is to be dumber than Google and just take the damn highway after all, with the exception of a few certain areas (like "the highway's moving ok overall but the exit I need will be backed up an extra five minutes so I'm going to got off early" type stuff).
Actually just got bit by this this morning. Google said to take 405 - sepulveda because there was "no traffic" towards lax. Turns out that's because sepulveda was basically closed for road work. Ended up almost an hour later than I planned.
I had completely different experience. We would have been stuck in traffic for 30-45 mins had we followed Google Maps, but using waze's alternate route we passed through it in 10 mins.
