Just learned that something I’d been told long ago, and passed along as fact to many others, is wrong: mapping railroads does not keep train riders from corrupting data on adjacent streets, and may not even suppress their ability to pave.
With that in mind, what purpose is served by drawing in all the railroads? Should they be deleted, or is there a possibility that they may eventually perform the above functions?
The source of that information…is Waze?
If I understand you correctly, then deleting the railroads isn’t going to solve the problem, right? So let’s not delete them. Waze needs to figure out how to fix it.
You may recall the purpose of drawing in the railroads was not just to avoid impacting nearby road segments, but to serve as visual reference points should railroads ever be returned to the client. I’ve spent far too many hours painstakingly drawing them in, labeling them with the correct owner, and keeping up with the Surface Transportation Board changes to each line.
Waze’s current position on that issue is:
“Railroads should be labeled as such in the editor. For the time being they won’t make it to the client indeed, but in the future we might want to use them for display purposes. The ‘railroad’ road type in the editor is under ‘non-drivable’ so it should not cause any issue to the routing.”
Best,
banished
But we all know that those road types are still available for routing…
Overall I agree that since they aren’t doing any harm, they should stay…
I may have been mapcat’s source on this… I’ve seen MPs that show a user on a railroad, then snapped to adjacent roads and back… I’ve also seen small neighborhood roads that run parallel the a railroad with speeds over 70mph…
You were, and the authority with which you said it gave the impression that it was based on an official pronouncement that I had missed.
Given GPS inaccuracies, of course, even if railroads were behaving as I thought they were, there would still be some misplacement of the the data.
I said this in the other thread, I’ve seen drawing in railroads completely stop some chronic “missing road” automated MP’s caused by Wazing on a train. I used to get a ton of these in Orange, CA and a few up in Fresno, and after a month or so of drawing in the train tracks they almost completely stopped showing up. Before that they’d show up every week or two. (Also, this was last summer, so something may have changed since then)
That said, for sure it does not stop people from paving while on a train, as I still see those show up from time to time, directly ontop/underneath the existing train tracks.
I say keep the railroads and lock them down. Inexperienced editors love to add whatever they possibly can and in areas where the maps are fairly mature, railroads attract them like black holes attracting photons.
Better that they’re there, do no purpose and are not editable, than an inexperienced editor adding them, creating all these junctions that cause people to be routed down railroad tracks to their demise.
“Why did you go down the railroad tracks?”
“Because my GPS told me so.”
Good to know they’re keeping MPs down. But it’s hard for me to understand how/why they can be effective at that while being ineffective at suppressing paving. FWIW, people can certainly pave while driving navigable segments too, although thankfully they don’t very often.
Eventually it would be helpful to see them in the client (ONLY after some other method of leaving notes in WME becomes available). Maybe that might limit the desire for paving.
Is there any point in encouraging Waze to change their behavior?
I think it was discussed in the meetup in San Fran. I don’t remember what came out of it.
A lot of the chronic pavers are familiar with the editor and want to “add” things. If they already see it in the editor, they are less likely to pave it. I know, it’s odd because you don’t see the railroads on the map, but there’s no explaining human behavior.
My theory:
Paving is done in the app. Since the app doesn’t see railroads, there’s nothing preventing it from allowing paving.
MPs are generated by Waze when it processes the raw GPS logs periodically. So if the GPS tracks are directly on top of a railroad, this process won’t create “Missing road” MPs.
This is an unfortunate side effect of locking everything we’ve reviewed already. In so-called mature areas, there’s very little for local noob editors to do except pave railroads (that appear to not be part of the system on the client map), add every neighborhood tree as a landmark, and map every parking stall at the local 7-Eleven or corner strip mall dry cleaner…
We can lock all we want, but short of disciplinary action for repeated vandal behavior, I don’t think we can really block noobs, or anyone for that matter, from adding new things to the map.
I would much rather have them pave away railroads (which don’t show up on maps), then them starting to add individuals lanes to freeways and streets. Once again, end users want a consistent experience with navigation. If it’s not consistent they will drop the app immediately. Trees, landmarks, etc, are annoying but have no effect on them getting from Point A to Point B. We can clean those as we find them. If a user can’t get from Point A to Point B because a new editor came along and incorrectly edited things, they will uninstall the app immediately.