Srinagarindra Rd. = why do people keep changing it to minor Highway, when it’s just a primary street in the middle of the city, all the way from start to finish?
Lad Prao Rd. = why do people set as MAJOR highway/Expressway/Freeway, when it’s… another primary street, sunk in the middle of the city, from start to finish? Makes no sense on the maps, or to the roads around it…
PS: Kronos, sorry I missed you here in Bkk back in January, I had a problem with a cat with broken leg, and shortly after, I had a gout attack in my ankle and I couldn’t walk for weeks… :\
If 3344 - Sri Nagarindra Rd isn’t a minor highway, I don’t know what standard you want it to be. Any better and it becomes a free way. Most part of it has level separated intersections and even on/off ramps.
Lad Phrao Rd. (336) I by definition a major highway set by argus-cronus, see sticky post.
Looking at the road standard I would say that putting them as primary streets are wrong and doesn’t help navigation to find alternate routes around toll roads.
And I have driven on Sri Nagarindra alot so I know first hand how it looks like.
No Vidur, I live here, beside Srinagarindra, and it’s far from being anything like a highway. It’s a main street, with hundreds, if not thousands of streets connected directly to it, dozens of traffic lights and still nowadays, several in-level intersections. Most of the day traffic there moves at 10-20km/h, specially in the areas where Seacon Square, Paradise Park, Thanya Shopping Mall and Tesco and other supermarkets are. Srinagarindra Road is a primary street, very much like Sukhumvit and Pattanakarn/Petchaburi Road, or Rama 4. It’s not a matter of what it looks like, it’s a matter of what the road actually is. It’s not a highway in any sense, major or minor.
About Lat Prao, same thing. I don’t know how many times or when you guys passed by there, I know argus has Thai family and comes here often, but still, that is a primary street, very much similar to, again, Pattanakarn, Petchaburi, Rama 4… with the elevated areas for free flow traffic, but the average moving speed there is not more than 10-20km/h during the day, and there are literally thousands of in-level intersections.
Major highway would be something like the bottom of Bang-Na-Trad, Petchakasen for most part after the urban area, or even Sukhumvit Road after it leaves metro-Bangkok. Freeways here (the ones with no intersections, as per Waze definition) are rare, restricted in most part to the elevated tollways, where traffic - for most of the time - don’t stop because of the entry/exit points, which are rare, plus parts of Phahon Yothin (1) (few), Mittrapphab (4), Bangkok-Chomburi (7).
And I didn’t just pass by there, I live here and I drove around 130,000km in Thailand for the past 3 years, probably 1/3 or more of that in Bangkok alone
Just because the traffic isnt moving arnt a reason to set it to primary street, its just to many cars. And by your own definition you said it your self that it is a minor highway. Bang na trat road is a freeway like road.
No Vidur, it’s not a highway just because it has 4 lanes on each direction, or elevated intersections. It’s just a urban avenue, though Thais don’t have different words for “road, avenue, highway, expressway, freeway”. For them, it’s all Thanon, or soi/moo for the small ones.
There is nothing in Srinagarindra that, by any international OR Waze standards, in any way resembles a highway. It’s a city avenue, a big one, but just an avenue. Same with Lad Prao, Ratchadaphisek, Rama IV, Rama VI, Rama III, Sukhumvit Road, Petchaburi, and lots of others. Those are all avenues, or in Waze, Major/Main Streets.
I appreciate the guide from argus, he knows A LOT of course, but that guide was made 2-3 years ago, when there was nothing more than main roads here. Since then, we have been adding a lot of new roads, changes, etc, and the landscape has changed quite a lot as well. For example, there is no way we can set Sukhumvit Road, in all its extension, as “road number 3”, as freeway/expressway. The same road passes by hundreds of cities in its 300+km along the east coast of Thailand, down to Trat. By all I read in the editing manual, Waze servers use the road type to create the navigation map, and not setting the segments as they actually are will make no sense to the server, as well as to us, looking at the maps, when Waze doesn’t know if we should get the elevated Chalong Rat freeway, or just go along Lad Prao. Btw, it takes artound 3-4h to drive from one end to the other of Lad Prao on a Friday evening, and that’s like 20km. That is just a big avenue, and not that big even. Nothing compared to an expressway or freeway.
BangNa-Trad is divided in 3 parts for most of its extension, the Bhurapha Whiti Express/Tollway, and Bang-Na Trad proper “downstairs”, with its 3-4 lanes expressway (not really a freeway, due to numerous ins/outs/u-turns which slow down traffic A LOT) plus the frontage roads around it, which are almost as large as the express lanes in the center. To disconsider the nature of the roads and just follow a guide that doesn’t reflect the reality is very much random, and renders the map useless for locals and visitors. What is the point of using Waze if the system won’t know how to give you traffic alerts or re-routing because the road type is wrong? What is the point of using Waze if you look in the map and don’t see the correct colors of the roads, which is a MAIN thing in any map, color coding. See the subway maps all around the world… this keeps it precise, simple and undertandable to everyone using the system, not just a few people who have been to the road a few times and edit/change everything from 10.000km away… :\
While still a labeled route that can be followed to get from one city/town/neighborhood to another, routing of thru traffic is not always a priority in the street design. Some minor highways are built with a higher priority on through traffic, while other minor highways are nothing more than a label dropped onto existing residential streets.
Minor Highways vary widely from large multi-lane roads with stoplights and higher speed limits, to small residential streets with stops signs.
Some minor highways may zigzag thru an area with many turns on local streets.
A Minor Highway thru the main street of a small town often retains focus on local access with pedestrian traffic and on street parking.
As a good note, remember that in major construction zones for Highways under construction, often Waze will try to route you through the construction, as if its the only route, since it prefers highways.
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Primary Street
Major roads or boulevards used to get across a neighborhood or city.
Usually given higher priority for right of way with traffic controls.
Primary streets may have less residential driveways.
A town’s “Main Street,” if it is not a highway, is typically a primary street.
In some regions “County Roads” are typically primary streets.
A primary designation is very relative to population and traffic densities. In the smallest rural town, a primary street may barely be wide enough for two cars heading opposite directions to pass each other. In dense urban areas primary streets may need to be a divided road with multiple lanes of traffic in each direction having traffic controls at every intersection.
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you really can’t see the difference? It looks and guides us BAD in the maps. If that makes no difference to you, fine, but don’t change the map to be worst for the locals.
Hi, sorry to that it took me so long to respond, I have gone away from for a week and the internet here isn’t the finest, but I have hop of improvement since I get fiber soon.
First I just would like to make one thing clear, I don’t edit he map to make it worse, I edit the map to make it better.
Second, I still think Sri Nagarindra Rd is minor highway, both to road standard, number and how it’s connected to other express ways in the area. Nothing in the wiki contradicts this.
But I you have routing issues let us look into what that problem and try to solve it.
The reason I started to edit he map in and around Bangkok was to make it better. When I tried to use Waze to navigate to/from the soi at Sri Nagarinda Waze took me on some major major detours around Samut Prakan.
Biggest problem then was the Burapha Withi Expressway and Hwy 34, that should be a free way since it is, but after talking to Argus we let your change to Major highway be since i doesn’t affect routing and it easier to see it close to the elevated road in the editor. I fixed all entrance/exits to/from the front road and added missing ramps to/from the express way, after the number of error reports have come down to minimum. But still its a complex system to drive in due to the express ways block satellite signal on 34 and that they use the same tracks.
But back to your problem, maybe putting Lad Prao as Major Highways was to much, we can maybe start by lower this road to minor highway, but I want Argus input to this to, and we need to change all segments. If this is OK I can do this when I get back home Internet for me now is just to slow to try to edit.
Lets work together in a positive way to improve Waze since we both want the same thine, a good navigation tool around traffic in Bangkok. And if we make it work like it work around Stockholm we will get even more people using it so it will get even better.
OT example, Bangkok is about 10 time bigger then Stockholm but Stockholm has 10 times more users and the map is 100 times better in Stockholm then in Bangkok.
Of course, but considering the local driving conditions, making a totally urban “avenue” to be listed in the system as a HIGHWAY, which means it shows in the map as an extremely bulky lane in an area with thousands of other streets dropping right into it, makes visualization and navigation confusing and erratic.
Bangkok reality: there are not many possible re-routing possibilities. 95% of the roads end in a khlong/canal, or a dead end. You either stick to the main road, no toll free, or get one of the urban tollways, from which you can’t really re-route into other places without losing MAJOR time. Trust me, I live this, I live here. Lots of times I go out to drive just to see how routing working, or to check road conditions and update/add missing points to the map. Routing in Bangkok is not just a MAJOR IMPOSSIBLE issue to solve, because most Thais don’t know what is north, south, east, west, and have no idea how to read a map, even if that is something like # in front of them. I can’t say Waze will never be used for that here, I hope it will, but the major utility at the moment is to have as many roads in the system as possible, so people can actually see where they are driving and send road reports. This is what most of what they do in Longdo Maps, the local system, used 100x more than Waze over here, based on OpenStreet Maps afaik. (but slow as …)
You would have problems with Garmin, Cygic, Google Maps, TomTom… there’s not a single system, even professionally made over the course of decades, that works really well in Bangkok, due to the points I noted above. No one uses them either, for the other reasons I explained above. :\
I started using and editing Waze back in 2010 because the area I lived, in central Bangkok, had 1 street off Sukhumvit Road, and no minor sois what-so-ever. Back then Waze was useless around here, now, due to the help of a lot of people and careful checking from Argus and a few others top-ranked, we can actually use it for navigation here and there, but no one really does it, and I don’t think it will be ever used… well, I can’t say ever, but Bangkok is an ever changing city, roads disappear, entire blocks get wiped out to give way to new elevated streets trying to alleviate traffic, with no success… There are maybe 10mi cars and nearly 15-20mi people living in metro-Bangkok (estimations vary), and yet, I think 50-100 people actually use Waze daily, it’s not enough… we need a concise system that looks good on the smartphones, so people actually “change” to it, from Google Maps (which just started working with Navigation over here), or even from the “car navigation” which is coming embedded in most top-version cars nowadays. We need more roads, sois, connections, names. I dedicate my time adding roads and making them connected to others, and eventually, when I see the area mapped, I’ll go back there and edit the names. For our reality, that’s second importance… this is why I insist so much in the correct color coding, that’s the only way people will actually use it, it will make sense to them/us.
I unfortunately cannot edit maps as much as I would like to. I’m limited by the internet over here, even having a 50/10mbps vDSL connection at home, it takes like a minute to save 30-40 edits, and most of the time when I try to save over 70-80 edits, I get errors… this happens way less since the old editor went to sleep, but it’s still a bit frustrating sometimes, and not even using a german or singapore proxy helps much, just sometimes. :\
Elevated Burapha Withi is a freeway, one of the few in the country. I never changed that, it’s locked in level 5 I think. The street level is composed by a “minor highway” (could be a service road, if it wasn’t available from beginning to end as a highway) in the external area and a “major highway” (not freeway) in the center. It’s important to differentiate that, mostly so people know where the road report was actually made, otherwise you see “something in a big blue blur”.
Unfortunately we don’t have other kinds of roads, or the ability to set the number of lanes or speed limit on them. I still vouch for using “street” for what is a street, even if the shape would make it a highway if it was a connection between cities for ex (which probably WAS the reality of Srinagarindra Rd. 30-50 years ago, or Sukhumvit Rd. 70-100 years ago), and highway for what is a highway proper. There are 2 kinds of streets only, and it would be great to have a 3rd… but as it is, these 2 kinds have to be enough. The 3 kinds of highway are sufficient, but they also will never reflect the diversity of an evolving country, being adequate for most locations in Europe, where the landscape was “finished” at least decades ago.
I am whenever possible working in the maps, but I see navigation capacity as something almost totally useless for Thailand, at least until the point the map is 90% better and more complete than it is now. Reality here, and the nature of people won’t make use of the navigation, and less people use will mean map less accurate, which for waze is… dead end. I love mapping, I do it for myself and for the few people who turn it on once in a while, which considering the size of the country and specially the city of Bangkok, are nothing to make it real usefull… yet. Maybe some day.
Regarding Srinagarindra: I got it from start to end yesterday, and it’s an avenue all along. It starts in Sukhumvit Road, when Sukhumvit is still an avenue, and ends in Lad Prao, which is another avenue. It cannot have higher priority on routing and different colour coding than other avenues, and it can’t be described as a highway, if all traffic laws enforced are city ones. There is no hard shoulder, there is no “entry/exit” areas, and the overpasses are just made to alleviate traffic on the intersections, just like it’s being done in most of other large avenues in Bangkok.
I suggest we review argus’ code, not because it’s wrong, but because as the map grows in complexity, we have to make it so to be simple to be read, and Waze servers have to know what the roads really are, no matter what they look like if compared to somewhere else.
Thailand has a very non Western way of building roads so to try a Western wiki on Thai roads isn’t that easy. Just the way Srinagarindra is built, 6 Lane road with 2 lane more or less only used as turn lanes into small tight soi roads is very much the Thai style. Even when you drive on Hwy 1 or 2 that looks like a freeway you still have small roads connecting and people selling all kind of stuff beside the heavy used highway.
I be back home next week, we can continue this then now my internet is just to slow ad painful to use.
