Does the WAZE community especially in Montana want all the driveways marked. Some are long and I can see marking so one doesn’t stumble down them, but others are quite obvious and only a few hundred feet. The map has them marked but unedited. Is the intention to list all driveways over a certain distance?
When it comes to more rural driveways as long as it looks like there’s a residence there I keep them in place and if I’m really focused in on editing that area I’ll ensure they’re set to a “Private” type and make them two-way with a u-turn allowed up near the house. When you use them with accurate address markers placed where the house sits, it’s a really great experience to navigate right up to the destination. Note, I don’t go adding in driveways inside city limits (unless it’s a strange situation where there’s an abnormally long driveways).
My two cents, they don’t hurt anything and given that a lot of roads in rural areas you’re traveling much faster than inner city speeds, it’s nice to have an instruction that has you taking a right or left at an intersection with a driveway. In addition, they act somewhat as a landmark. You’ll see some errors reported or system issues generated in the Editor at will complain someone was advised to turn down into a driveway… this is a sign of a routing issue or a turn restriction issues (in most cases) so there’s likely more going on. Deleting that driveway wouldn’t solve the underlying issue that caused what the reporter or the system noticed.
One other item to note. Make sure the geometry looks good as I’ve seen a lot of driveways that would results in traveling down a highway and hearing a stay right or stay left command. Just make certain that the driveways are connecting with nearby roads at a 90 deg angle.
If you do happen to encounter some properties or fields with driveway segments running out into the middle of them, don’t hesitate to delete them if it looks like there’s no relevant driveway there. Sometimes the driveways will be off in alignment or shifted to far in one direction or another, but there’s a lot of rural farmsteads that have been left, abandoned and demolished and old data still shows their driveways.
There’s a driveways page in the wiki which covers the topic.
Thanks Alan, and I did read through it.
Of course the Western US and states like Montana do have a distinct difference in types and lengths of driveways so I was attempting to get some thoughts on what I felt were grey areas specific to our region.
There are some gray areas, but in general, if an address/location cannot be reasonably guided to without a private drive, it can be added. “Reasonable” can be subjective of course. If it’s a single house at the end of a 1mi private drive, and that’s the only house, it probably isn’t needed. If it’s 5 houses at the end of a single shared 1/4mi long private drive, it probably is needed. If it’s a house at the end of a 500m long private drive which is right up against another street from which you cannot access the address (stop point will be on the segment closest), then a private drive is probably needed.