Many of the roads in and around Los Angeles, and the San Fernando valley have been changed to either Major Highways or minor highways instead of major streets, or streets. The only actual Highway in the Valley besides the freeways, is Topanga Canyon which should be a Minor highway imho,and maybe as it is a numbered highway,27, and maybe Sepulveda Blvd. are these changes correct? The all used to be major streets or streets.
Thank you for a great app.
This link has some great information on what we are doing regarding classification of roads…
https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=251&t=90107&start=30
wb6anp,
The US Waze Champs have been discussing this major change to our road type usage for a couple of years now, but it has just finally boiled down to a firm plan. Another good place for you to read about it is in the updated Road Types page in the wiki:
https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Road_types/USA
Don’t be too concerned about the names “Minor Highway” and “Major Highway”. We are now using these road types purely for their relative rank to other types, not as designations that the roads are in any respect highways.
Think of it like this. Before, most of Southern California was mapped with only three road types, Freeway, Primary Street, and Street (with a few notable Minor Highway exceptions, such as Topanga). The problem was that our Primary Streets could be anything from a busy two lane collector through a residential neighborhood, to an 8 lane section of Wilshire Blvd in west LA. We need more road types to bring some differentiation between all of those streets. The urban streets which ARE technically Minor Highways, and were designated as such in the Waze map, were being favored too heavily by the routing algorithms, because they were seen as being functionally superior to Primary Streets. This was also the reason that Waze was so much more likely to plot routes on jammed freeways, rather than opting for more free flowing street routes - too big a functional gap between Primary Street and Freeway types.
Along comes Functional Classification, a nationwide system, by which the States and the Federal Government have cooperated to rank their roads in terms of relative function. In California, the DOT (Department of Transportation)/CalTrans have provided us with maps which rank the roads according to their traffic data (and a lot of other criteria). Following these guidelines, we are changing many of the local road types in ways that seem strange if you go by the names of the types, but make a lot of sense when you look at how the various roads compare to each other, relatively.
I have found the occasional place where I disagree with the DOT, and think they want a road too high or too low in the system, but these are exceptions which we can get together and discuss in the local editing community once the overall project is complete. So far, the results in routing efficiency in the lower LA basin have been very good.