Is there a plan to produce a best practices guide for landmark editing for the US servers? Last time I checked the wiki it was blank.
The reason I ask is because I see more and more large blocks of area marked off as parking lots by various editors. They will include entire buildings, parks and more as a parking lot. Similarly, I am starting to see equally large area’s being tagged as gas stations where no gas station even exists.
Some of these are created by admin(6) which I assume is an automated bot, but most are not.
I am also curious what effect landmarks have on waze when attempting to route to a gas station via your current route? Does it use landmarks for this purpose, or does it perform some other method of identifying these landmarks? If the latter, what purpose does identifying landmarks on waze have on the actually routing system?
I agree that having some more guidance to get us on a consistent path would be nice, but waze needs to decide how gas stations will be handled here first.
There are many parking lots (at least on the MD side of DC) that were added by the IGN team. It seems that suppressing map problems and traffic reports from cars in parking lots was being addressed by the IGN team by putting in parking landmarks. These landmarks in my experience typcially included the buildings as well. An example is the Annapolis Mall.
The other issue is that quite a few landmarks seem to have come in with the base map. Some of these (particularly golf courses) over the course of fiddling with the landmark classifications have been given a default class. With the introduction of the gas price feature, gas stations have been made the default landmark and these landmarks now show as gas stations. This is likely the created by admin(6) gas stations that you are seeing. Example here.
I guess all I’m saying is that many of the problems here are largely traceable directly back to waze and not to the editors.
My understanding is that when routing to a gas station from the gas station category list in the US the current landmark layer is not used. In other words the imported gas station data is currently separate from the landmark layer. It also my understanding that the gas station data will be made available in WME for ongoing maintenance by the editors, but that this has not happened yet. Until we see how this is done, it seems to me that it is premature to develop best practices guidelines.
The parking lot landmark suppresses auto generated errors for “missing roads” so is used to solve those errors. There’s no reason though to cover buildings with it. I don’t know that it harms anything other than cluttering up the client map.
Actually from what I understand, there is, because in the beta version of the WME, editors CAN ‘add information about gas stations beyond the fact that it exists’, and at some point this will be made production as well.
Best practice at this point: if it’s a gas station, create a landmark for it with its brand name, and more magic will happen later.
What I quoted above was from the US guidelines in the post I linked to… It seems that the landmark will allow Waze to search for the Name of the station & navigate to it, but not enable gas prices. The gas prices come from a different database…
I’ve been adding gas station landmarks in the US because of the gas price function that is on the way & the simple fact they suppress traffic jams & problem reports of people looping through the station…
In the US there is already a TOTALLY SEPARATE gas station landmark layer that has NOTHING TO DO with the gas stations that may exist as visible landmarks in WME. Please don’t add (or delete) any gas stations in WME in the US.
I think that the quote is unclear at best. I guess the biggest problem is that I don’t really understand how waze searches and navigates to landmarks.
For example, if I search for “The White House” under the waze tab I currently get two entries for “White House, Washington, DC” and one entry for “White House, NJ” (and a bunch of garbage related to Rutter’s). Are any of these really related to the “The White House” landmark. Seems unlikely to me as the landmark has the “The” in the name.
If I search for “Sherwood Forest Golf Course” (the name of the landmark I linked to above as a erroneous default gas station), I get back a ton of results with “Golf Course” or “Sherwood Forest” in the name ranging from local to Wisconsin and Alabama, but none seem to be the actual landmark.
Seems dangerous to me. I don’t trust waze to merge the gas stations that exist in the landmark layer with the imported list of stations with price data in a coherent efficient manner.
As far as I can tell, Waze no longer routes to landmarks in its own database. It will use an external provider (since most landmarks were never added) and use its roads to get to that place.
The only reasons to add landmarks (besides gas stations in other countries) are to make them visible in the client, and in the case of parking lots, to suppress traffic.
I put a paragraph in the Wiki last week about landmarks in general and that they should not overlap roads unless they’re part of the landmark, so as not to interfere with traffic jam suppression. It was the only reference to landmarks I could find in the Wiki, and it had nothing in it.
Someone needs to get some info together and put it into that page.
Grrrrrrrrrrr this recent change broke on of my Waze Wins. Waze used to be the ONLY navigation app that had Buffalo Creek Gun Club / Campfickes as a searchable and routable destination.
Hi, I suspect that a 7-11 gas station located at the corner of 104th and Idalia is creating false slow traffic alerts on 104th to appear. Is it recommended to add a parking lot landmark there to try to suppress these false reports?
A gas station landmark will suppress reports there, and would be more correct than a parking lot. However, it was mentioned a week or two ago not to add any gas stations until we got to some point with the gas prices functionality. I’m not sure if that’s correct or still the case.
