Input wanted: Dirt roads in NoVA

Map Editors Community United States Virginia
1

Hi all,

I’ve seen some discussion on other states’ forums regarding this, and it seems to be pertinent to Virginia as well. Do we have any consensus as to how to handle dirt roads in VA, and if not, can we open that up for discussion?

Here’s my concern… At one point in time I used to live in Lovettsville but commute back and forth to NoVA for work (so the area that I’m discussing, if you’re trying to find it on the map, is the area between Leesburg and Lovettsville/Point of Rocks.) Obviously at times I would encounter traffic on the normal routes home, so I investigated alternative routes to take when traffic was bad. Some alternates are good; some not so much. e.g. Taylorstown Road is narrow and winding but a fine road. Downey Mill and Tankerville on the map look like good alternatives if Taylorstown or Milltown is backed up, but are in reality about 1.5 lanes wide and loose, muddy gravel. There are a few roads on the map in that area that are imported from the basemap as “private roads” which I am inclined to delete completely; I wouldn’t try to get through them in anything but a farm tractor or a 4WD with a minimum of 37 inch tires; my stockish Cherokee would be buried up to the axles quite quickly.

I am just throwing this out before I do anything because I don’t want to make sweeping changes to a large portion of the map without some kind of buy in from the community, and also my concern is that if I mark the roads that I know are unpaved as dirt, should a good paved road have traffic people might be diverted onto even less suitable roads.

So, question, should I go ahead and mark e.g. Downey Mill and Tankerville as dirt? My inclination is yes. But should all unpaved roads be marked as dirt? Or only ones where an editor feels that there is a real danger of being stuck or sliding off the road if taking that road in a normal passenger vehicle?

I did have reason to be in that area today and took my Jeep just out of curiosity (and now it looks like a proper Jeep, with mud up to the bottoms of the windows) and took a few roads that I hadn’t been on in years and also tried what looked like a few shortcuts on the map, there are definitely roads in that area that I would not have even tried in my car, and there was one map issue that I wanted to look into and I couldn’t even get to the area in my Jeep as I “only” have 30" tires.

Unrelated question. It looks like Lucketts has disappeared from the map, but I’m not entirely sure what is considered to be the actual limits of Lucketts. Anyone want to take that one?

Another unrelated question. Any objection to renaming VA-287/Berlin Pike to Berlin Turnpike with an alternate street name of SR-287 to make it consistent with how we’ve been naming roads in the area? All signage refers to it as “Berlin Tpke” (SIC) and the GIS maps say the same, but I did not grow up in this area so I don’t really know if it’s colloquially known as “Berlin Pike.” (Charles Town Pike, which intersects it, however is definitely Charles Town Pike both in WME and on the GIS maps. Go figure.)

Opinions appreciated!

2

Typing Downey Mill and Tankervile as dirt roads makes sense to me. There are certainly those that would prefer to avoid them. I would agree that that private roads that your Jeep can’t get through likely shouldn’t be mapped at all.

3

OK, well I didn’t see anyone step in so I started changing the roads I was confident of to “dirt” type… definitely did not get them all though because my knowledge of roads in that general area is not encyclopedic.

Any thoughts from anyone on the Berlin Pike thing?

4

This may have been a bad idea. I changed a few roads to “Dirt Road/4x4 Trail” and it is very nice with my custom schema as I’ve set the color for dirt to be distinct from the other street types and also I assume that this means the dirt road navigation settings will be respected.

HOWEVER… the names of the roads no longer show up in the client. I’m looking at my schema to see if this is something I can adjust (I have already set declutter for Dirt Road/4x4 Trail to the same as Street so that they appear/disappear at the same time, but the names of streets appear and those of dirt roads do not) and have also posted in the suggestions forum as well.

I’m conflicted on whether I should leave them or change them back.

Edit: I posted something about this on the color schemes thread just in case it was related to that and it seems to be that it is; when I changed the thickness of the dirt roads in my schema to 2 (1 is default, 2 is default for streets) then suddenly I had my street names back - I am happy with this setup; I set the dirt roads to a distinct brownish color so that if I were using Waze as a map but not navigating I could decide for myself whether or not to take a dirt road.

5

Ahh, I didn’t know that was the cause. It states in the wiki that road names don’t show in the client, but when I searched for Downey Mill on the client I could see the name. I haven’t yet had the time to figure out why.

6

Without knowing what schema you’re using I would guess that it is.

The same appears to be true for “Walking Trail” road type as well. I increased that to 2 in the schema that I’m working on and now I have labels for W&OD, C&O, etc. Pretty useless for a driving app on the face of it but I find it useful to orient myself.

Someone posted in the color schemes thread that they’d always had dirt road names, but they were running iOS so this may be a difference between iOS and Android (or perhaps it’s related to the screen resolution of the device being used? But mine is pretty good…)

7

That was me! As posted in the other thread, I could get the “Dirt Road / 4x4 Trail” names to appear at the most detailed zoom level with any of the standard themes in iOS. I may need to pan around sometimes to get certain names to display, but it works. I’m running 3.7.8 but know that this has displayed the street names with every version since I started using the app in September.

After seeing this post today, I decided to test it out on my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S3 (720x1280 res). She’s never had Waze installed, and with the default theme, I had the dirt road names display in Android 3.7.8. As with iOS, it was only at the most detailed zoom level. This is really lame, but I couldn’t get the Android screenshot to work right, so I took an iPhone screenshot of a picture of Android… :oops: Higgins, Deering, Rushview and a few others are dirt.

Here is a permalink to the area and Color Highlights showing the dirt roads.

Perhaps Waze changed something in the app since that note was placed on the wiki page (after all, we know that all road types will display soon, but Waze may have snuck in the dirt road name display change in an earlier version). It seems like it would be a fairly minor bug fix if it was not originally intended. CBenson referenced his showing the name too. All I know is that I’m two for two on different devices, different resolutions, and OSes. What other variables may come into play, and can a number of other users test this out?

8

I performed some quick testing using Waze 3.7.8 on a Galaxy S4 with Android OS 4.2.2.

Both dirt road and walking trail names appeared at the same zoom level that “street” names do.

This occured in both the 2D and 3D view.

Sent using Tapatalk.

9

My usual phone is a Motorola Photon Q and that doesn’t show dirt or trail unless I set thickness to 2 in the schema. Now I just tried on my Nexus 7 and I am getting the names, but it is the WiFi only model so I can’t actually run it (unless I root my phone and tether, and I have thought about it but don’t currently have the free time to figure it out.). So it may be resolution related, Nexus 7 is 1280x800 (1st gen) and photon is 960x540. Haven’t tested on my old Photon (no service on that one as I retired it when Sprint got 4g LTE in my area.)

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk