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Service Roads or Primary Streets?

Post by jasonh300
doomedtx wrote:https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=5&lat ... 1,67153944

I'm not taking potshots at mapcat, just trying to learn. There are long stretches of "Frontage Road" paralleling I-30 E and W near Little Rock, AR. They are currently designated as Primary Streets, but by definition aren't they Service Roads? They're not locked, so I could go change them, but considering the source I wanted to see if there was a reason to keep them that way.
It could go either way. Depends on how bold you want it to appear on the map. I have an expressway here that carries a US-Hwy route on the ground level service roads and they're Minor Highways alongside the Freeway. If it's done any other way, Waze tends to direct people onto and off of the elevated Expressway for short runs between on-ramp and off-ramp and then it's nearly impossible to make a right turn. That problem went away with using the MInor Highway.

Primary Street won't solve that kind of problem, but it'll show up a little better on the map. I guess it depends on whether it's being used primarily to access businesses, or if it's a through route. The former would be a Service Road. The latter would be something else.
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Post by jasonh300
doomedtx wrote:From the wiki:
Also often known as a frontage road.
A smaller street found running alongside a limited access highway or other primary street.
Service roads allow local traffic to enter and exit driveways, parking lots, and intersecting streets without congesting thoroughfare traffic.
Since these roads run parallel to I-30 for the purpose of entering or exiting a freeway and are named "I-30 Frontage Road," they still seem to meet the wiki definition of a Service Road. Every service/frontage road I've ever seen has on- and off-ramp connections to the freeway, so I don't think there would ever be a frontage road that you could completely delete without impacting users' ability to enter or exit the freeway.

In the end, I guess it's like everything else: it depends. There's a wiki "standard," and we apply it if it strikes us as the best answer for the situation. I'm going to leave the frontage roads alone and concentrate on the dozens of URs that popped up in my primary area since yesterday.
An addendum needs to be made to that definition: "If such a road can be used to travel from Point A to Point B without either of those points being a ramp or a business along that road, it is not a service road."
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Post by littlestlou
All Service roads in my region, N. Texas, are labeled as such. I know down in Austin they were using Primary Streets. From a visual perspective, I think it looks better and makes the Freeway stand out more using the correct Service type. That's just opinion of course.
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Post by mapcat
Late to the party I know, but: many if not all of those were showing up as primary roads before I did anything to them. Anything I changed from service to primary was in the interest of consistency.

Personally in an urban/suburban setting, primary makes sense. In a rural area, service is probably right, unless it's in between a ramp and the road served by that exit, in which case I've been using primary.
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Post by Scruffy151
I would also say that it depends on the traffic handling capacity of the frontage road. The more volume it can handle the more likely it should be a primary instead of a service.
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Post by WeeeZer14
This is the definition I am working with in my own head: Service Roads "service" the entrances to businesses and residences along a major thoroughfare. The Service Road does not have a name of its own or it has the exact same name as the major thoroughfare.

If that road next to the major thoroughfare is itself a thoroughfare (even a minor one), then it is NOT a Service Road.

If we totally removed a Service Road from the map, the only impact should be routing to/from a location directly on that Service Road. If it would impact more things, like people traveling cross town or accessing a freeway on ramp, then it is NOT a Service Road.
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Post by WeeeZer14
I'm starting to become a fan of getting rid of the Service Road type all together. The TX interstate frontage roads were my prime example of what I originally thought a service road should be. But the routing engine treats Service Roads as the same level as Streets. That gives strange, inefficient routing as Jason gave an example of.

I've seen interchanges where you have to get off of say an Interstate and then travel for a block on a "Frontage Road" to get to the Major Highway. So in effect you have a regular street segment in between a Freeway and a Major highway which will impact or break long distance routing.

So then we could have Waze upgrade Service Road to be a higher category of road (Minor Hwy, Major Hwy, Freeway, Ramp). BUT then we have plenty of places where people have made service ALLEYS into Service Roads. So that would create horrible local road navigation effects.

I still say that based on the way Service Roads are weighted (same as Streets) and the way they appear in the Live Map (invisible), it seems that the Waze developers intended Service Roads to meet the very limited definition I mentioned earlier.

In the end we either need to get them to change the behavior of Service Roads, or accept what it is and change the way we use Service Roads.
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