https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=usa&lon=-122.13513&lat=37.16891&layers=133&zoom=7&segments=5478766
This segment is part of a private road that was shown with “unknown direction”. It was already connected to the highway, but fixing it to be 2-way caused the turn restrictions to the highway and from the two adjacent highway segments to be wrong. These turns are allowed (but the road is gated). [Edit]Is there a way to show roads that are gated? Time restrictions don’t seem to fit, as people with a key can always pass; and vehicle types doesn’t include “authorized vehicles”.[/Edit]
There is no way to show a gate, and not really a need. It helps a lot to remember that the primary purpose of the Waze map is not to show exactly what’s there. There are a lot of things we don’t map, like gates, stoplights, metering lights, all stuff that’s pretty significant if you’re driving. The reason is that Waze is first and foremost a routing app, not a literal app for representing everything that’s there.
So the question is, how does a gate affect routing? It only affects routing for people who need to get past it. Nobody else cares. So, we set gated roads to “private” which causes the router to use them only for drivers whose destination requires that they take that road. Then we assume that any driver who really needs to reach that destination will be able to cope somehow with the gate. If not, that’s not Waze’s fault.
That being said, it is possible to do timed segment restrictions etc. But that’s way overkill for a small school on the outskirts of Boulder Creek. Some of those private-road segments I’m not sure are really there, they can’t be seen on the satellite view. If I had ground truth showing that they weren’t there, or were there but only as little more than disused ruts, I’d delete them…
Honestly, I’m not seeing a reason for that road to even be mapped. There are no house numbers on it, it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere navigable, except behind the school, and no one’s going to Waze there. It would be far more important to map the parking lot along the highway, in front of the school to prevent parking lot traffic from poisoning the SR-9 speeds.
As far as gates, to add to what Dwarf said, it depends entirely on the situation and usage, but you can either disconnect them (e.g. locked municipal gates), use TRs, use a short segment of Private Road (see: Large Private Installations, in the Wiki). There is no one solution, it’s going to be different every time.
And a closed school, at that. The road(s) are there, I’ve walked them - but only used by school district maintenance people to move materials around the site. It’s not clear to me how they got mapped in the first place - they had “direction unknown” but they were not red. I suspect that they have no utility for Waze users and should be deleted. Maybe on my next pass, if you don’t do it first…
The Waze map started with an import which we refer to as the Base Map. Its data was flawed in many ways. Many roads in rural areas were apparently drawn based on visual characteristics in aerial imagery which merely resembled roads. At the beginning, all the roads were unknown direction, and in areas where the concentration of Wazers and editors is not high, many of these roads still exist in their original state. A segment creation date of January 15, 2009 is a dead give-away of base-map origins. There’s an oddity of the map editor which applies usernames to the creation credit for base-map segments, so that does not tell us much, but the date usually doesn’t lie.
Thanks for the comments. I guess I was thinking maybe someone would Waze from there - but that’s not likely either. I will add the parking lot roads next time I’m working there - but of course, someone will have to help me connect them to Hwy 9…
There’s a lot of Hwy 9 speeds (and locations) not getting properly recorded due to network dropout in the mountains. I saw an automatically-generated map problem on the Santa Clara County side of Hwy 9 that wanted a new road segment to connect two others because drivers “seemed” to be driving in a geometrically straight line between two points a couple of miles apart (a physical impossibility in those mountains). I suspect that they were disappearing from the network at about the same point and appearing again a while later at about the same point and Waze interpreted that as straight line travel between those two points. I just closed it as “not identified”. https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=usa&lon=-122.09609&lat=37.26017&layers=165&zoom=5
You did the right thing with that MP (auto-generated Map Problem), and I agree with your assessment of the cause. Network gaps can be maddening, especially when they are long enough to cause the app to time out looking for a connection, so the previous part of the drive is lost.
This particular case notwithstanding, it’s also a good thing to consider, as you did, whether someone might want to navigate from somewhere, rather than just to. This is often overlooked.