I’m working on probably the second largest road closure event in NYC, Summer Streets and I’ve got all the closure information set to go. The only thing I can’t find any information about, is how to designate allowable cross-points. The city is closing nearly 7 miles of a very major north/south avenue that cuts Manhattan in half, and there are several points along the route where vehicles will be allowed to cross. The Major Event presentation indicates that all junctions along the closed route will also be closed - but can I include notes in the spreadsheet as to exactly which junctions should remain open for crossing traffic? Or is there even support for this at this time?
If not, I suppose I could leave the segment above and below the cross point open. This should keep the junction open. And hopefully Waze won’t attempt to route someone up or down the closed avenue, just across.
Thoughts? Thanks!
EDIT:
I got confirmation from WazeHQ:
Crossing the route is allowed by default, and we have to block it by adding a closure to the crossing segments. See post below for details.
I’m not sure. But I think you need to include the crossing streets in the spread sheet to prevent crossing. I’ve seen others complain about crossing through closures before. I’m not sure whether this a bug or not. Currently, you can cross a closure on Virginia Ave for the African Leaders Summit in DC. Not sure if that is a good example or not as it is permitted and Virginia Ave is only closed eastbound.
The Major Event presentation seems ambiguous to me. It states that “we” will also block those junctions segments to prevent cross traffic, but shows those segments selected for entry into the sheet. It seems that “we” may mean that you must also block those segments.
I think a lot of us are keen to understand this, especially with events like Summer Streets where you have an exceedingly long closure with very specific cross points. To keep all crossings closed would no doubt enrage drivers because they would be taken on a very long tour of Manhattan. To keep all crossings open would no doubt enrage drivers because they would be asked to cross at every single street (unless enough other irritated drivers manage to manually close each and every street).
I think if they were all open by default we could work around this by closing the one-way input segments to the closed Avenue. If they were all closed by default we could work around this by opening the avenue segments immediately above and below the cross street. I just need to know which so I can plan accordingly.
I checked the other active Major Events (Africa Summit isn’t published on the main page for some reason), and I couldn’t find any good examples of a major street being closed with several cross streets. I tested a routes the same as you did with the Africa Summit, and it seems to indicate that junctions on the route are OPEN by default.
Crossing the route is allowed by default, and we have to block it by adding a closure to the crossing segments.
I took a look at how they were updating my permalinks to prevent crossing, and it looks like the output segment for a one-way crossing, or any single segment for a two-way crossing is added to the closure list. This would allow drivers to still get to addresses on the inbound one-way crossing (assuming it’s allowed), and as close as possible to an address on either side.
For example, if you were to block Park Ave between 75th and 87th, only allowing traffic to cross the route at 79th, you could do it like this
It appears that WazeHQ is more than willing to do this for you, but I think in the interest of lightening their load, and making sure that the closures are exactly as the submitter intends, we should probably handle permitted and prohibited crossings ourselves. I would recommend adding a note to the sheet that you have already accounted for permitted and prohibited crossings, and that they do not need to add any additional segments.
One other note I got is that they prefer the layers to be set to 5 (sat and road layer only). Obviously they can go through and fix this very easily – but again, if it’s something we can do to have the sheet more ready to go for them, I think everyone will be happier.
Back in February, I had an exchange with Gal about this very subject – and it’s entirely possible the process has changed since then, so don’t go on this info.
At that time the revised information, with the crossings added by staff and times converted to UTC, was added to a duplicated sheet entitled Closures UTC, because the original sheet, with just the route on it was used for the map on the Waze Major Events page, while the Closures sheet was used for the system to install the closures, including the crossings. I haven’t had a Mega Event in a while (though I’m waiting for confirmation on one right now) so I can’t see what you’re seeing as far as the updated permalinks, so things could very well be different now.
