True, but the driver should not be relying on Waze to decide how fast to negotiate an RA. Just as we still specify the higher speed limit in school zones, the driver needs to take responsibility to negotiate the RA safely.
Agreed, but every little bit helps. Even a single 5m wayfinder caused a 0.1% shortfall on Idaho’s freeway SL completion. RAs are much longer than 5m, and I know of dozens of roundabouts that we have. It will add up.
Is a score really that important? Why not just focus on FWys, MH, mH, and Ursula and deal with the small stuff later? SLs seem to be the only focus. Even if the US was 100% it’s not going live the next day.
Not all editors working on this are high-ranking. Most won’t have access to adjust FW/MH/mH without unlocks, and some will want to do what they can with the access they have. Questions are being fielded about how to set up SL on RA, and we don’t yet have wiki guidance.
So whether or not SL should/shouldn’t be the focus is not really the question at hand–we’re discussing whether or not SL should/shouldn’t be placed on RAs, and why one holds the position they do.
We are not saying to make RA SLs a priority or focus. The guidance simply answers the question of is it appropriate to add a SL to a RA, and if so what SL should be used?
SkyviewGuru brings up a good point about a driver using commonsense to negotiate a RA. The end user isn’t going to do 30 through a school zone that has a posted 25 during said times strictly because Waze says so. If a RA is has two connecting segments that are mH and segment SL are 30 both in and out,the RA is 30, the end user isn’t going to do 30 through the RA. Commonsense will come into play. We may get UR’s complaining about SL on the RA but those can be handled on a case by case basis.
Of course the minor inconvenience for states that are currently focusing adding SL data. RA’s are not going to get them to a 100% completion on MH, mH and PS. This should not be a determining factor when considering to add SL to RA’s.
I think you missed an OR (in red above). The rule for ramps is to use an SL if the SL before and after is identical OR if there is a posted SL for the ramp.
This is what I suggested for the RA as well above.
I really appreciate this wiki page, as I’ve been adding quite a few SLs in North Carolina area.
However, I disagree with the guidance for the median segment – it would be preferable in my opinion to just leave the speed limit blank than to have a short segment with 20 mph in one direction and 35 mph in the other.
This is partly philosophical in nature, but what is the harm if we were to put school zone speed limits as the speed limit for those segments? My thoughts: Majority of the drivers probably are driving during school hours near the school, speeding during in a school zone would be the harsher fine/penalty for the driver, people will speed regardless of what is posted, some states have ambiguous signs like when children present which could make the speed limit in effect anytime.
Overall I think even if people were favorable to allowing school zones being allowed for SL it probably would be a state by state decision. But this is one of those I don’t know what level discussion occurred on this specific topic as the national guidelines were developed and as things evolve sometimes it is good to revisit some topics.
This is only opinion here; I don’t speak for Waze and nothing’s been released yet on Waze’s plans (to my knowledge).
In essence, Waze seems to like to roll out new features in phases instead of having everything ready at the first launch. Probably for a couple of reasons…one, so they can get feedback and then adjust their goals/plans/etc based on that feedback. Another being that the development of the new feature can be shown to the community more frequently, keeping the app fresh and helping people to see that it’s very much under active development, which then brings in the feedback.
I see this as the first phase. I suspect Waze will expand the feature because they have gotten a ton of feedback on it, and if/when they do, it would have something more appropriate for these adjusted speed limits than the space we have now.
As this was Waze’s first shot at Speed Limits and I think we can hope for improvements in the future. I wouldn’t want to shoehorn “advisory” or “special” speed limits into the current system, and then try to extract them from it later.
Also, school zones vary so much in their implementation it could be hard for any speed limit to adequately capture the rules there. Maybe a permanent “School Zone” advisory like we see for cameras would be a better fit. We’ve given Waze a lot of feedback on schools, so hopefully we will see additional features in the future.
I think for this phase of speed limit implementation, we should stick to permanent speed limits, or at the very least, long term construction zones as they are encountered, but frankly, I’m hesitant to even embrace that, despite community popularity the other way.
Perhaps there is an override system coming in the future - sometime during the proverbial soon - that will work like TBR, where you can define temporary override speed limits where applicable. We might actually be doing our future selves a disservice by trying to hack speed limit variances in the meantime. For now, just about anything is better than the status quo of nothing, and temporary speed reductions typically have some sort of auxiliary means of drawing your attention, whether with red flags, orange signs, or flashers, etc., right?
I have a really big issue about the school speed limits. It’s the biggest most dangerous issue I’ve seen on Waze: We’re posting speed limits that are ABOVE the legal limit in school zones. This is absolutely absurd.
While we figure out what might happen about time-changing speed limits, can’t we just agree not to publish speed limits?
As it stands, I can see it now, people will use this as an excuse to speed through school zones. They’ll use it in defense of killing a kid because they were flying through there. Heck, if someone really dies and had Waze up, prosecutors and civil suits could be brought after the wiki editors and map editors who say to publish 55 MPH speed limits when they know during school hours it’s 25. There is precedence for this sort of thing. At the end of the day, the fine print might not allow it to stand-up, but there still could be a civil suit that would be costly to fight and we have our conscience on our minds as well that some people will look at the speed limits in Waze and follow them.
Providing indication of a speed limit is not telling anyone how fast to drive in current conditions. I’m not sure if you are saying that we are actually contributing to unsafe driving in school zones or if you are simply stating that unsafe drivers (or victims of unsafe drivers) will blame waze. On the former, sure the more warnings a driver gets to slow down in a school zone the more likely the driver is to slow down. So I certainly agree that accommodating school zone speed limits would be better. However, we can’t currently, so there will be no warning either because the limit is set to the default limit or because no limit is set. As far as safety goes I’m not seeing a difference.
As far as the legal issue goes, lets just leave it to Google’s lawyers to make the call.
Yes, I am saying “we are actually contributing to unsafe driving in school zones” and I am “stating that unsafe drivers (or victims of unsafe drivers) will blame waze”.
I agree, Google lawyers should make a call and am confident they will agree with me. Have they reviewed these guidelines with the recommendation to post higher than legal speed limits in school zones? If not, how do we contact them on this issue. I am very concerned about this for the kids and Waze in general.
