Hi , I had noticed that some of the railroads in certain sections had been mapped as streets , either due to proximity / parallely running to roads. Some of this could have been created by wazers paving them as roads (using pave road option) while travelling by train. This results in wrong navigations.
The solution could be to upfront map all the railroads and lock them from being wrongly classified as streets etc.
There is an option in the waze editor to mark it as railroads (under the non drivable section of road types). hence it would be appropriate to mark railroads as railroads instead of walking trails(which would be misleading ). Thus in future railroad crossings or Bridges can be identified too.
The method of marking railroads as Walking Trails, has been arrived at, after extensive testing… The biggest reason being this, that “Railroad” Segments do not have the “Snap to” ability, for a Wazer Wazing on a Train…
people wazing on a train are snapped to the rails and not to the closest road.
because there is a railroad visible nobody will attempt to pave a new one.
the map looks more complete if railroads are visible.
Use walking trail and give it the name “Railroad”. Make sure it is never connected to anything else but other Railroads, best practice is to give it a distinctive level like -5. This will make it harder to connect roads by accident. It would be very nice if Waze changed the railroad-type to be of any use, but until then - walking trails work best.
Hi Chris, Before raising this query, I had already earmarked many of the railroads as railroads in my area, looks like i need to change their category to walking trail.
On the other hand , isnt wazing supposed to be for Driving , what use does it serve for someone travelling by train (except that it gives points and enables new editable areas to map) ? With that said, I saw that when i tested wazing on train and when there were no railroad tracks mapped, waze just snapped to the nearby parallel roads and started munching roads. On the other hand if i were travelling by unmapped road parallel to a railroad which is marked as walking trail, wont waze snap to a walking trail ? would this be prevented if it were marked as railroad ? (I need to test this too i guess) ? I will post my experience on this later!
Thanks Chris, I realized it this week when I travelled by train and now I have started mapping railroads as walking trails. (Eg. Bangalore - Salem - Erode railroad)