I’m pretty new to Waze, but have decided to jump in with both feet! I’ve been granted area manager access to everything south of 16th Ave at this point, which should keep me busy for quite a while.
One thing I’ve noticed is a bunch of inconsistencies in the way that roads are classified. There’s a lot of no-exit private/service roads (speed limits less than 40km/h) that are marked as “Minor Highway”. As a result, they show up on the map when zoomed out really far. I’m working on fixing these at the moment.
Additionally, a lot of exits from one road to another are classified as “Ramps”… which also makes them appear much higher up in the zoom level than they should. From the looks of it, ramps should only be used when connecting to (or from!) a highway.
Here’s my thoughts on the hierarchy of roads in town:
Stoney Trail NE, Highway 2 (outside the city limits) – 110km/h: Freeway
Deerfoot Trail – 100km/h: Major Highway
Stoney Trail NW, Glenmore, Crowchild, etc. – 80km/h: Minor Highway
60-70km/h: Primary Street
50km/h: Street
Little private culdesacs (15-40km/h): Service Road
Any thoughts?
doctorkb note, 2014-Feb-26: A quick note for anyone coming across this in the future…
These road types do not match current wiki standards, nor the practice – I’ve left this topic in place for historical purpose, but it isn’t appropriate for current practices.
That sounds fine but when editing I have noticed a lot of road lose their direction by Waze trying to auto guess so please lock in the direction of a road. Especially at intersections you may also notice some intersections having an additional road in the middle, this is for turning so Waze will not allow U-turns your notice them where I have put them.
Service roads is meant for gravel type roads on sides of Highways for example where you would find gas stations, rest stops etc, regular street type for residential streets is appropriate. The rest sounds good. I am moving to Calgary and am glad to see a big community there but the naming appears somewhat cluttered to me, South-west North-west take up a lot of screen room and waze usually displays everything! so you end up with screen full of these long hand forms. SE, NW etc are much tighter and easier to recognize in my opinion.
As for these roads I’ve been marking as service roads – I would have used private roads, but was worried that the phone app would not utilize them in navigation. In any case, when I’ve got some time, I may go back and change them to regular streets. I’m still only working south of 16th Avenue N, so there are still quite a few incorrect “minor highways” north of that.
Regarding the directionality on the street names… that’s the way it was when I got here! With the map editor being as clunky as it is, I was hesitant to switch to a different standard and make things inconsistent. The task of changing every street in the city manually is a daunting one.
Have any of you gentlemen dealt with anything slightly more rural? I am managing around Kneehill County and many (all) of the Rural Routes and Township Roads are dirt roads and unpaved. Do you know what I’m talking about? They are labelled as Major Street in the map editor. I feel that they all should be changed to Dirt Road but then, compared to the rest of rural AB, it will appear empty. Do you think this is appropriate?
Sorry about the delay in replying – I don’t check the forums very often!
In my opinion, you should label the roads as what they are. They’ll still show up on the map when zoomed in, and will reflect the actual condition of the roads.