Noticed it too, also see they added it to the road,roundabout,landmark tab at top with parking lots. I hope we get to edit gas stations soon.

jasonh300 wrote:One thing that I have noticed on a similar subject, is that in Los Angeles, different neighborhood names pop up all over the map. I think it's convenient for a city of that size where every segment for miles has the same label. But the way it was done is someone just labeled one segment in the middle of the neighborhood with the name. That gets it to appear on the map without a bunch of huge geometry outlines of each neighborhood in the City later.

Without the huge geometry outlines, do the reports use the neighborhoods? In other words, if you just label one segment, do you get the report, "Heavy traffic on I-405 N in Inglewood" or "Heavy traffic on I-405 N in Los Angles?"

mapcat wrote:

xtago wrote:Maybe for a uni/collage you could do a fence line landamark and use land marks for the buildings so you have a general map of the site overall.

Please don't do that. There's no need for building landmarks within another landmark covering the whole area. Maybe it would be worthwhile to identify an arena/stadium or important museum on the campus, but not every building. The result is a massive landmark with many words scrambled together or appearing at random. Waze can't tell what landmarks are more important than the others, so, as with city names, it just guesses.

And beyond that, all landmarks seem to appear the same colour, grey. Only parks stand out as different since they're green. The client can't show different landmarks-within-landmarks if they're the same colour so it does look the jumbled mess.

The only exception I've found is when I put a stadium inside a park, and it looks nice because of the contrasting colours. Everything else has been terrible.

Since landmarks have so little use in Waze beyond aesthetics on the client map, I've taken a few parking lot landmarks and expanded them to cover the entire shopping centres they represent, named them for the shopping centre and that solves two problems at once: it prevents Waze from throwing errors AND gives the large shopping centres a visible landmark with name on the map.

Waze can control the amount of clutter one sees on the map. In fact there's a "declutter" setting for each visible feature that can be edited in the schema files on your device. I've changed all the colours and line thicknesses to better show up on my AMOLED screen device.

Unfortunately, it appears that the declutter feature is not yet implemented. So maybe in the future the amount of labels displayed can be tweaked to accommodate things like neighbourhood names.

mapcat wrote:

xtago wrote:Maybe for a uni/collage you could do a fence line landamark and use land marks for the buildings so you have a general map of the site overall.

Please don't do that. There's no need for building landmarks within another landmark covering the whole area. Maybe it would be worthwhile to identify an arena/stadium or important museum on the campus, but not every building. The result is a massive landmark with many words scrambled together or appearing at random. Waze can't tell what landmarks are more important than the others, so, as with city names, it just guesses.

See that's the problem with my university right now. Someone suggested that I should delete the huge university landmark and put the university's name as the city so the app would display everything. I didn't want to do that since I don't know if it would mess up searches within the app pertaining to the university.

jasonh300 wrote:Neither landmarks, nor the city name associated with street segments has any effect in search (in basemapped countries for sure).

Then do you think that's a good thing to do?

Make sure it needs a landmark though. In the US we primarily use the landmark function for major landmarks like schools, hospitals, parks, lakes, military bases, etc.

Waze doesn't use the landmarks for navigation, so the only reason to add them is for point of reference. There's no need to landmark local businesses.

Also, Waze will only display landmarks that are above a certain size. Your typical restaurant, including parking lot is too small to show up.

You can use the "parking lot" landmark to prevent Waze from creating system generated errors about missing roads, but how often you should do this seems to be under some debate.

Here's a good thread discussing the creation of a "Best Practices" page for landmark's in the US, as well as some debate about when to use different types:
http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=276&t=26005

Youncs, I would be interested in looking at a few of your landmarks as examples. Thanks for sharing your considered view on the topic.

Neither landmarks, nor the city name associated with street segments has any effect in search (in basemapped countries for sure).

douglasr007 wrote:

jasonh300 wrote:Neither landmarks, nor the city name associated with street segments has any effect in search (in basemapped countries for sure).

Then do you think that's a good thing to do?

I've recently tried this in a couple of locations to see what happens. One is a large cemetery and the other is a Federal Zone that has been set up in New Orleans where a Naval Base used to be. Since the City layer hasn't been updated in a very long time, I haven't seen the results. I know what it will do with regards to display, but I haven't been able to test for any negative side effects.

That being said, I don't think it's a bad idea...it will get it to show boldly on the map IF the city layers ever get updated. If you do it, keep a very close eye on things and look for odd behavior. Officially, I've never seen any guidelines or policy on this.

One thing that I have noticed on a similar subject, is that in Los Angeles, different neighborhood names pop up all over the map. I think it's convenient for a city of that size where every segment for miles has the same label. But the way it was done is someone just labeled one segment in the middle of the neighborhood with the name. That gets it to appear on the map without a bunch of huge geometry outlines of each neighborhood in the City later.

If you're not comfortable changing the city name for every segment, you can change the name of one segment and get it to appear.