" Google Maps is too conservative with its routing, it tends to stick to highways if at all possible."
and waze is far in the other direction, often telling people to get on and off highways repeatedly to save 30 seconds.
In fact, waze estimates it will save time, but in practice, it rarely does for me.
The routing of either is just a cost model for the same path finding engine. Maps seems to try to avoid various types of road transitions, assuming that it's traffic data isn't perfect and these things have some cost (IE traffic lights, etc, which are not accounted for except as average traffic speed)
Waze seems to simply assume the apparently shortest fastest path will actually turn out that way.
Waze is often wrong, Maps rarely is.
When Waze is wrong, it often takes only as long as Maps does or longer, (i've had Waze tell me to take routes it claimed were 5 minutes faster, that were 10 minutes longer).
Maps is usually accurate, but it may leave something on the table.
I'd still rather have the second.
Trying to pretend you have good data when you don't doesn't lead to good results.
(IE garbage in, garbage out).
