With that in mind, as you make updates, make sure other editors in your area are aware of the new guidelines.
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For the time being, it may be best to lock any segments that were updated, to the highest lock you can put down. Then get in touch with your local editors and explain the changes and encourage them to participate here in the forums and review the wikis. I have a couple 1 & 2 ranked editors here in Indy and so far they don’t have forum messages enabled. So my limited communication with them so far is through some user reports. Then after a given period of time, if the changed segments don’t have any out standing issues that would warrant their lock to remain in place, lower the lock level down a notch or so.
I experienced a similar situation in Michigan where NFC edits were undone by lower ranked editors.
Locking seems a bit heavy-handed, but given what has also been discussed regarding (potential) auto-locking based on usage, this also seems prudent. But given the state of rural mapping situations, please be prepared to educate editors (and be on the lookout) for unlock needs related to these NFC-rated and locked roads. Until the NFC rated road rankings become the norm and local editors won’t be tempted to question these rankings, it will be a situation we’ll have to deal with.
Large chunk of the “Primary Streets” & " Minor Highways" that were reclassified to Major Highway have been completed in the Marion-Hendricks County area. Still need to work on a few other roads after the locks have been lowered. Then I can move on to roads that have been reclassified to " Minor Highway" & Primary Street. Hope to have most of everything migrated over to it’s new classification by Friday afternoon!
I already noticed the change in downtown Indy, and it has affected routing. It was such a minor change that I don’t know if it is a few seconds longer or shorter.
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I’ve only touched 16th Street so far in Downtown Indy, I will be changing the classification of MLK/Michigan Rd as soon as the lock gets lowered( put in request). I haven’t heard much from the Senior Area Managers ( 4+ cones) on the FC map. I’ll PM them and hopefully we can get a lending hand!
Everything that was reclassified to Major Highway & Freeway in Marion County has been completed! Marion County looks like it’s dripping in red, however now I can finally move on to roads reclassified to Minor and Primary and begin to fill out the rest of the Marion County map and then finally branch out and cover my other areas. I never thought working on this would take so long, and here I thought I would have the whole thing wrapped up by tomorrow! I hope to have everything up to new classification by Memorial Day weekend!
Just wondering if we have many editors working on this in the northern part of Indiana? I’ve been working on the changeover in NW Indiana - starting at the Illinois line and work south and east from there. Hopefully we can get the heavily traveled corridor from the Illinois line to the Michigan line converted to match efforts in those adjoining states in addition to what is being converted within Indiana.
If their are any other editors working on this, I haven’t seen them.
I’ve done most of the Michigan line moving from east to west. I’ll plan on eventually upgrading everything north of US-20 in Indiana as well with the goal of providing better continuity for border routes.
As I’ve moved along, I’ve taken notes on variations in road type as we cross state lines from Michigan into Ohio and now Indiana. I just worked on a few of the roads in northern Steuben county, and functionally, it’s an exact match between MI and IN. That’s hopefully promising for other routes as we cross the border, but I’m most curious to see what happens when we get to Elkhart and South Bend since it involves heavily populated areas matched up with mostly rural area. Where I’ve been seeing discrepancies for the most part in both IN and OH are in the automatic upgrades to mH for state highways that are functionally collectors.
To date, until we can settle the question nationally or perhaps regionally on what to do in situations like this, I’ve left things “as is”. In this case, do we leave this as a PS/collector and do nothing, upgrade it to mH even though it’s not a MI state highway, or downgrade a small stretch of SR 120 since functionally, it’s a collector? That’s not a question that I believe we can or should answer now until we can look at a lot of border upgrades in more detail, but it may be on the horizon.
All of Hendricks, Marion, Hamilton Counties in the Indy area have been updated accordingly as well as Madison County. Delaware County I will finish tomorrow and then pan out to other areas and check on them.
The discrepancies in that area seem to be related to county? I guess we also have to consider what other purpose the FC has for state/county road commission(s). For routing purposes (from a waze perspective) if 2 mHwys are connected by nothing more than a primary street type with no clear alternatives, seems like the logical conclusion is to upgrade to mHwy. Unfortunately there is also no way to mark deviations from FC (either upgrades or downgrades) either. There is a (state) road in my area that shows equivalent to interstate that extends into a residential area. There is no way I would upgrade the street type in that way - and part of the road was a bridge that was torn down too. All that is to say FC provides guidance, but we should not follow FC so completely as to ignore local practicality.
No, the discrepancies (so far) have come from our Waze road type rule to have state highways automatically mH as a minimum. Being rural areas, a number of state highways in Steuben and LaGrange counties are collectors that would functionally be PS, but they get bumped to mH. Functionally though in rural areas, since there aren’t too many roads going across the borders, they typically end up as collectors on both sides. When IN state roads get to the Michigan border, they sometimes continue as collectors in MI, and because they aren’t state roads in MI, there’s a “gap” in the Waze road type. In this case, that gap exists because of our Waze exception for state highways, not due to anything between INDOT and MDOT.
I agree that with a small gap like Territorial Rd where it is PS for a few miles between mH, it logically would get the upgrade because there would be no harm if Waze considered the route for long distance travel rather than prune it. It would be an exception to an exception though that we would want to document or risk having downgraded/upgraded by someone not in the loop.
I could just as logically argue though that IN State Rd 120 could be downgraded to its functional class of collector = PS back to Fremont or the I-80 interchange. As a result, for now, I’m leaving these as I find them so that we can have a good picture or case study of what discrepancies exist, and then make a prudent decision based on what we actually find. What I would hope to avoid is managing a list of numerous exceptions where editors may potentially disagree. I actually used this example in the national thread, but I think that for things like this, localized rules on which border editors can agree may be more appropriate.
Also, this is coming from the rural perspective. I’m not quite to Elkhart going from east to west, but how are things looking for NW Indiana at the Illinois and Michigan borders? Any MH bumping up against PS or Street at the border, etc? Any general exception(s) to the new road type guidelines that we create should weigh toward where we have the most impact on drivers, so I would be much more concerned about border roads in NW rather than NE Indiana.
i’m pretty much done with Monroe county and i’m working outward from there. i’ve been dragging my heels for a while on this, but it’s been going a little more smoothly after i got the hang of it. sure wish i had a second display so i didn’t have to keep switching windows…
definitely take what you’re seeing on these FC maps with a grain of salt: i’ve found Principal and Minor arterial streets on the maps that do not exist on the surface of the planet. non-existent roads that are classified as major highway. some i think there are plans to build, and some are no longer there. there’s a road in bloomington i was supposed to switch to minor highway that has had a bypass built around it, and there’s another that is a residential street with chicanes and speed bumps. Found a minor arterial that’s actually a walking trail on the Indiana University campus. I-69 will be coming together quite soon and many of the roads connecting to IN37 will be cut off, rendering these maps obsolete rather quickly. I understand why they want us to use these maps, but if they didn’t need us to make these local corrections they could just import the GIS data and make the changes automatically.
I got Metropolitan Indianapolis, Anderson-Muncie area completed and correct other areas as I come across them. Definitely very time consuming to make every legal correction, especially Indy area!
There was a good reason. Take a look at this segment:
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=3&lat=39.07588&lon=-86.09874&layers=901&env=usa&segments=69152948,16401100,69152917,69152216
You correctly set this as a 4x4 trail/dirt road. The FC maps say this should be a primary road, but I didn’t change it because it would break the client preference to avoid dirt roads.
I don’t see anything in the Wiki that would make this exemption, but to me, it is clear that we can’t take a dirt road and make it a primary road.
Agree/disagree?
There were one or two minor arterials on the Elkhart map that crossed the river where there was clearly no bridge, and there never was a bridge. I’m not sure if INDOT just didn’t proofread, but yes, we need to use common sense when looking at the maps.
As for dirt roads, we have an exception on our Michigan wiki page where dirt stays “dirt road/4x4 trail” for the reason that you stated. There are numerous collectors and even one minor arterial that I’ve found that have been dirt. It was recently clarified after the North American Meetup this year that dirt roads have the same “resolution level” as a primary street, which means that it gets pruned out of initial consideration unless it’s in the first or last 15km of a route. Since it would function similar to a primary street if someone has the “allow” option enabled, but be discounted if someone has the “don’t allow” option, opting to classify collectors as “dirt road/4x4 trail” when appropriate has little to no disadvantage from a routing perspective.
I would definitely agree that if you have local information that is either a) based on common sense or b) based on continuity with thru-routes we shouldn’t be absolute slaves to FC. That does not mean that we can set road types based on our personal preference, but in the same way we can’t follow GPS into the lake (or onto airport runways) we must have sound reason for the deviation. Unfortunately we have no way of making that note, so an unfamiliar editor might mistakenly undo these changes - but that is a risk. That also means that we should be careful when editing out of our areas of local expertise that we should at least set types consistent with FC - even when we may think illogical - and perhaps open a forum topic where all of these exceptions can be documented.
It almost seems like dirt roads needs to be a checkbox, as opposed to a street type, sorta like toll roads. that way they’ll still be on the map and can fit in to the overall puzzle but it’s up to the user as to whether they are considered as part of the route.
jdeyoung wrote:
Just wondering if we have many editors working on this in the northern part of Indiana? I’ve been working on the changeover in NW Indiana - starting at the Illinois line and work south and east from there. Hopefully we can get the heavily traveled corridor from the Illinois line to the Michigan line converted to match efforts in those adjoining states in addition to what is being converted within Indiana.
To add to this, I’ve been using the indot FC maps to update the Indiana counties in my area, which include those along the IN border with Ohio, from the Mich line down to about I-70. The biggest job was in the Fort Wayne area, which only had the Freeways plus a few MH, so many PS and mh were added and appear to fit the area well in terms of moving traffic and serving as alternate routes arterial roads that might become backed-up.
Regarding the ‘this’ referenced by davielde, where SR 120, in NE Indian, a mh, becomes Territorial Rd in Michigan a PS, I would vote to leave them as they are since an upgrade or downgrade of either of the roads wouldn’t really affect routing. It would probably be more complicated to try to list various exceptions to the FC rules than the exceptions would solve. For longer distance routing, both roads appropriately direct traffic since they stand out from the adjacent roads in the area.