In the Santa Cruz Mountains where I live are many changed and changing road conditions because roads are literally washed out. And/or long-term construction has reduced a few very important roads to one lane. These changes will last for at least several months.
I’ve found that on the roads I regularly travel, Waze has absolutely inaccurate information about long-term road closures and construction.
How can the correct information be easily and quickly added to the Waze database by myself and my friends who are testing Waze?
How can the correct information kept there long-term (several months) until the road closures and reductions are re-opened?
Here are two examples of the many replies about Waze I’ve seen related to the questions I posed here on this forum:
1.) “Roads in the mountains are unsafe for even a two click condition report. I’ve tried to report the one-lane control on 84 when I was driving through it and decided it was too dangerous to go through with the flow. Not that I recommend doing so on a straight highway like 280, but it’s definitely more do-able there”
2.) "I tried for a few days, adding the one lane road hazard as I waited in line. Each time it disappeared after a short time so I gave up. There is no effective way to get a hazard to be ‘sticky.’ "
I’m also local, though luckily I don’t have to commute over The Hill.
As far as I know, there is no way for users to add a condition report that will last a long time. Condition reports by their nature are transient. Further, I don’t believe that volunteer editors using the map-editing website can add condition reports at all. Sorry not to have better news.
Regarding closures: yes, there is a tool one can use tell Waze about hard closures. If traffic is getting through we don’t mark that. The closure tool is only available to experienced editors (Rank 3 and up) who have editing access to the area in question.
As you are not yet a Rank-3 volunteer map editor, you won’t be able to add long-term closures from the map-editor web interface. You can add them from the app for shorter periods, but the system for doing so is buggy and frustrating, and fails altogether if there is no cell signal at the site.
So really the only thing you can do is approach a volunteer editor of sufficient rank and ask for their help. You can do that in this thread if you like.
I have been trying to maintain the major closures in the San Lorenzo Valley and Highway 17 corridors. However, I have not found ANY government websites that indicate severity of damage or estimated opening date. The SC County road page doesn’t. Caltrans doesn’t. CHP usually doesn’t. It has been infuriating trying to determine whether a road is closed for 3 hours while a crew hauls a downed tree away, or for 2 years while the road is rebuilt around a catalysmic slide. Several times I’ve hardly got through marking a closure before I find annoyed notes that it’s open again. Bear Creek Road opened and closed multiple times a day for awhile. It’s too much for a volunteer with a day job to keep up with.
Gradually it becomes clear which closures are long-term and which aren’t, and I’ve been trying to mark the major long-term closures in my volunteer spare time, focusing on the ones that affect through traffic over the hill.
If there are significant, long-term, hard closures in the Santa Cruz Mountains of which Waze is still unaware, by all means please provide details here and I will see what I can do.
OK, DwarfLord,
Thanks very much for your reply! Is the way to approach to approach a volunteer Waze editor by surfing this forum to identify and approach them?
Actually, your approach was about as perfect as you could have managed. You found and posted in the California subforum, and there really is no better way at present for the California Wazer community to reach volunteer map editors. Excellent work!
I can tell you that the most active editors on the Santa Cruz side of the hill are myself and editor bwawsc. We also both edit the other side of the hill but not as frequently; editor dfortney is more active there. All of us can place closures. I can alert both of them to subscribe to this thread to be informed of specifics.
The best way we can contribute is with the hard, long-term closures. None of us edit every day, sometimes we even take multi-day breaks from editing, and things opening and closing on the scale of a few hours are darn hard for us to stay on top of. It’s too bad the app doesn’t work better in this regard, it would be ideal if drivers were better able to mark those short-term closures in remote mountainous areas.
By the way, an FYI about Waze volunteer organization: some volunteers are “Area Managers” which is a community role that implies a person who actively supervises and coordinates editing activity in the granted area. So in answer to questions like yours, one sometimes hears “talk to the local AM”. That does make sense in theory, and indeed bwawsc, dfortney and I are all AMs. However there are some complexities with approaching people based only on their apparent AM status. I believe it’s generally more productive to come through this subforum exactly like you did.
[EDIT: Above the AM status is a higher role called State Manager (SM). Those are good people and if you can’t get things done with reaching out via this subforum or reaching out to AMs, an SM is always a good place to go. Our SMs are listed at the California Waze wiki page, here: https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/USA/California )]