ALL US EDITORS READ: New guidance for Road Type selection

Map Editors Community United States
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Editors,

After a lengthy discussion, the United States has adopted a new system for the determination of road types. The system is based on a combination of federal functional classification and the US and State highway systems.

Detailed guidance is available, as always, in the Wiki:
https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/USA/Road_types

In particular, the new system:

  • is standardized throughout the country, for a consistent Waze experience from coast to coast;
  • is well-defined, unlike the old, vague rules, meaning less time is spent on editor quibbles about what should be what; and
  • improves the performance of the routing engine considerably, especially with respect to traffic avoidance.

The system has been tested for months in various areas of the United States, with overwhelmingly positive results.

Happy Wazing,

sketch

In case you missed it: https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/USA/Road_types

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A note on implementation:

Naturally, the system works best when fully implemented, particularly throughout a given metropolitan area.

When implementing the system in your metropolitan area, it is best to coordinate efforts with other editors in your area, area managers, state managers, regional coordinators, and country managers. It took me about three days to implement the system fully in the New Orleans area myself, two weeks or so to implement the system fully in the Detroit area with the help of a couple other editors. Don’t hesitate to contact your compatriots!

To avoid growing pains / transitionary weirdness, it may be best to start with the longest principal arterial routes through your area and then “fill in the blanks” with the other/minor arterials and collectors. This way, the road system appearance will remain continuous through your area during the upgrade process, and routing may begin to improve ahead of time as well.

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A note on the scope of this update.

The guidance changed is limited to the “public roads” section of the article. The “other drivable roads” and “non-drivable roads” sections were not within the scope of this update, so the guidance in those sections has been left mostly unchanged.

The updated guidance applies only to roads which are paved with a hard surface — asphalt, concrete, bitumen, and so forth.

The “Dirt Road / 4x4 Trail” type is defined in this article as “A road that is not paved.” As it is part of the “Other drivable roads” section, it is not within the scope of this update.

In some states, particularly in the western part of the country, there exist unpaved roads that are nevertheless marked as types other than the “Dirt Road” type. Due to the nature of the Waze routing server, marking important unpaved roads as “Dirt Road” can have a serious adverse effect on routing. Do not change the type of these roads without checking your state’s guidance and, if necessary, contacting your regional coordinator.

I have modified the guidance in the article to reflect this.

sketch