
Why Waze is so popular in Costa Rica (2014) - hownottowrite
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/10/27/why-waze-is-so-incredibly-popular-in-costa-rica/
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agentCR
Costa Rican here. The article doesn't come close explaining the complexity
(and inconvenience) of addresses in Costa Rica. We even use landmarks which no
longer exist (e.g. from the old pharmacy in X, take a left), or use any
distinctive surrounding object for official guidance (trees, fences, wall
color).

Landmark usage for directions is greatly due to poor city planning throughout
the last century and the address culture grown around it. Most city streets do
have names/numbers, but are pretty much unknown to the common citizen. Waze
and its contributors have done a truly amazing job. I believe OSM has lagged
behind Waze because Waze was the first GPS nav system that actually worked in
the country, and was therefore so greatly welcomed.

P.D. Nokia maps also worked decently, but GPS-capable nokia phones were scarce
in the market.

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maxerickson
In the US, there were some pretty significant efforts to standardize road
names and house numbering (this largely happened at the county level). One of
the big reasons was to improve fire response, which was largely accomplished
by pushing the system in the direction of being logical (so roads in a county
will often be numbered sequentially and the like).

Are there agencies in Costa Rica that would push such a standardization, or if
the existing names and numbers are already reasonable, push the use of them?

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ghaff
My understanding in the US is that a lot of the naming rationalization was
done as part of the E911 location-aware service. This included giving numbers
to properties that either didn't have them or at least didn't commonly use
them (like summer cottages). It also involved, for example, giving segments of
roads different names if they weren't connected or if they had multiple
branches. It also largely rationalized cases where roads had different names
in the USPS database and on local maps. (My house effectively had two
different addresses when I moved in and I always needed to make sure local
service people knew where was house was; on more than one occasion I was
accused of giving someone the "wrong" address for my house.)

This largely happened before the widespread consumer use of GPS, but it
certainly helped when GPS rolled out.

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maxerickson
I guess E911 caused some further effort.

My grandfather died in 1994, and one of the things in his garage was an old
road sign that had names, rather than the numbers that are in use today (he
had been township clerk, I guess he quit that some years before).

Searching a bit finds lots of projects that were done ~1950 or earlier (often
in the context of making it easier for new residents to find their way
around).

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nickysielicki
I wish they'd have contributed to openstreetmap instead!

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/](http://www.openstreetmap.org/)

~~~
cake
Pretty sad that they contributed hundred of hours of their time that they
could lose any second if Google decided to ditch Waze.

Openstreetmaps allows you to download all the data for free.

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nickysielicki
Yup. And it's really great data, too. Building names, classification of
building types, etc.

I did a project with a friend last semester using PostGIS with data from OSM
and google glass. We learned a lot.

[http://www.madisonar.com/](http://www.madisonar.com/)

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beering
I'm always impressed by how hard people will work for a for-profit company for
no pay. Anyone here ever work for CDDB back in the day?

~~~
thekaleb
There is return on investment even if it is not monetarily. Users or reCAPTCHA
or Duolingo also do work for for-profit companies as well.

From the article:

> “Some people ask ‘Why do you work for free? Why do you spend so many hours a
> week doing this mapping?’ ” Hidalgo said. “You feel good about knowing that
> the people who drive around everyday save time because you are investing
> your time in fixing the roads and doing this mapping.”

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mullen
> “Most of our streets don’t have road names so a lot of the addresses end up
> being very much next to some kind of landmark associated with it, and that’s
> how we give directions,” Urbina said. “There’s never been good maps
> generated to be able to get to where you’re trying to go.”

How does a country not name its streets? I just can not wrap my head around
that very concept. Here in the US, we name hiking trails and put it on the
maps.

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pmastela
Japan, for instance, numbers blocks and leaves the empty space between them
nameless.

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cdelsolar
I walked around Tokyo a bit last year and without my phone + Wifi I would have
been horribly lost. There are no street signs anywhere.

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ghaff
I can get around Tokyo for the most part at a gross level--as in I can find
parks, railroad stations, and the like. But I think I spent an hour the last
time I was there searching for my company's office. Guidebook authors should
start thinking about including GPS coordinates although increasingly, given a
network connection, it's a moot point given Google Maps.

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resu
This really shows how using technology can leapfrog very costly gradual
infrastructure upgrades in terms of both time and cost. Amazing!

It does make we wonder though... Google Maps / Waze must get a decent amount
of information from tax funded sources. Do they give back helpful information
such as e.g. traffic flow/conditions in this example as well? Without having
to participate in a special 'campaign'?

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sokoloff
I spent 10 days in Costa Rica last month and didn't have a data plan with me
(so Waze is way less useful).

I used (and liked) the maps from Cenrut.org, which are easy to install on a
Garmin device I brought with me. You can also rent GPSs from the car rental
places, but for a long stay, it's just as cheap to buy a Garmin here in the
states and install the free Cenrut maps.

The Cenrut data wasn't perfect, but it was way more than adequate. It would be
madness to try to navigate the country from only a printed street map!

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Randgalt
Same issues here in Panama. We love Waze in Panama!

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plumeria
Waze is very useful here in CR. Many businesses here even put a Waze link on
their contact page.

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TheCowboy
Do you know why they favor Waze over something like openstreetmaps.org? Is it
related to the tooling? Did it just become popular first?

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dedward
Does openstreetmaps have a proper cross-platform phone app with turn by turn
instructions while you are driving that works well - and does it have a good
majority of costa rican roads?

