Problem is, this stretch of SR-9 follows a scenic but winding gorge. It was put in around 110 years ago. It is horribly slow and typically used by tourists and local traffic only.
Much of the area needs to route to Highway 17N, and the fastest way is via Mt Hermon Rd through Scotts Valley. Trips originating near Felton are indeed routed this way. But longer trips, originating from Bonny Doon for example, make Waze “lazy” and it searches for higher-classed roads instead of faster roads. Thus drivers from Bonny Doon are routed down SR-9 to Santa Cruz and then back up on 17 – horrible – or, worse, up SR-9 through Boulder Creek! For these longer trips, Mt Hermon Rd as a poor little primary street is beneath Waze’s notice despite being newer, better, and faster than SR-9 in all respects.
This post points out the underlying issue with Waze in the context of a similar issue elsewhere:
What can be done? Should that stretch of SR-9 be demoted to “Primary Street” even though it is a bona fide numbered State Route? Or should Mt Hermon Rd be raised to “Minor Highway” even though it is not a state or county route and has no number (as far as I know)?
I see this very road and this very concern was brought up in the global Navigation & Routing forum almost exactly one year ago, but the topic died without resolution, so despite it being a known issue Waze has been improperly routing people from Bonny Doon to San Jose for all that time. That’s discouraging.
I have reviewed the CalTrans functional classification for the region and am baffled. Mt Hermon Rd is not even on the map despite being a four-lane highway for much of its length and carrying heavy commute traffic to and from the San Lorenzo Valley at rush hour, while Ice Cream Grade is there as a minor collector though it’s close to one lane in spots and carries maybe one car every 4-5 minutes.
Edit: Strike the above paragraph, I didn’t realize how subsections of the CalTrans maps worked. Mt Hermon Rd is classed as 3 and 4, “other principal arterial” and “minor arterial”. SR-9 is classed as 4 and 5, “minor arterial” and “major collector”.
Perhaps it would be a better solution to promote Mt Hermon Rd to a minor highway. From my perspective on the ground it is every bit as much a minor highway as SR-9 if not more so, the only thing missing is a number.
I know if we go fully by the classification (CRS maps) then we have a lot of training and editing… And our cities will look like Detroit. I not saying that it is bad, but people would get confused because of the the current wiki description of each type. Waze name of type needs to by type 1, type 2, type 3… and we need to correlate that with Functional Classification types.
Also Waze is currently in a test phase with routing and getting the route engine to use not just higher types only for routing on longer routes.
Yup! That’s where I got the classifications for Mt Hermon Rd (3 and 4) and for SR-9 (4 and 5). So CalTrans classifies Mt Hermon Rd a notch higher than SR-9, which matches my perspective on the ground perfectly. However the Waze map currently classifies Mt Hermon Rd a notch lower than SR-9, as Primary Street rather than Minor Highway.
Holy cow…still, in our case the area is big, largely mountainous and rural, and served by so few major roads, I don’t believe promoting Mt Hermon Rd would take us down a slippery slope.
Good news!
How about this: we promote Mt Hermon Rd from Primary Street to Minor Highway on a tentative basis to get the area routing OK? Doing so would be entirely consistent with CalTrans classification and local usage. If Waze later changes their routing engine, and there is editorial dissatisfaction with Mt Hermon Rd as a Minor Highway, we can change it back and evaluate routing behavior of the new algorithm.
What you have outlined is great. And based on that information I am in total support to upgrade Mt Hermon Rd. Just make sure that Minor Highway (mH) connects to another mH or higher (MH/F) so we don’t have a gap between higher to lower to higher classification.
The 5 segments include two 5-m stubs that Kent worked on recently, they have different names to make the TTS work out, so it will say that there is “no common street” when you bring up the permalink.
The tiles were updated last night to include the new classification. Routing from Bonny Doon to San Jose is now including Mt Hermon Rd in its calculations for the first time since I started using Waze.
