New USA Road Types

Map Editors Community United States New Jersey
1

In case you haven’t yet heard, the USA Road Type rules have recently drastically changed, particularly which roads should be classified as non-freeway highways. As a result, many roads throughout the state will need updating. These road type updates will provide Waze with a much more robust selection of alternate routes to consider when your primary preferred route becomes congested, as well as more direct routes to places where there aren’t always divided and/or controlled-access highways. Here’s a quick rundown on how you can help if you’re editing in New Jersey:

  1. Review the new guidelines document for USA Road Types, if you haven’t already done so: https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Road_Types_(USA)

  2. Review the New Jersey Functional Classification Maps, particularly for the counties in your area: http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/refdata/roadway/fcmaps.shtm

  3. Grab a county near you and edit (please post what you’re working on here until we can develop a better system for tracking and publishing who’s working on what). I’d suggest that higher-rank managers start with NFC Primary Arterial Roads, Federal Routes, and Waze Major Highways. Middle-rank AMs can start with NFC Secondary Arterial Roads, State Routes, and Waze Minor Highways. Newer editors should be able to help out with NFC Collector Roads, County Routes, and Waze Primary Streets (all should be same in the end), as well as downgrading anything not specified in the NFC map and not having a numbered route marker to a plain street.

  4. If you come across any locks beyond your rank, please request an unlock or update in the USA Update/Unlock Forum, and we will either fix or unlock the issue described. We certainly want to avoid a patchwork of road types because certain segments are locked.

Question: Do we still need the page describing New Jersey Road Types, or are the new USA Road Type rules sufficient for New Jersey Roads?

2

Freeways and Primary Arterials/Federal Routes/Major Highways in Hudson County are done.

Freeways in Essex County look ok. I am currently working on Primary Arterials/Federal Routes/Major Highways in Essex County…

3

Let’s create a wiki to show where everybody is working on upgrading this. As we complete the roads we should update the wiki.
We can use our existing state wiki.

Before making changes, please make sure to check ranks. Do not start a road/segment/area unless you can finish the entire road/segment/area.

4

Agreed, but right now I’m having problems updating the NJ wiki page. It keeps randomly logging me out and/or telling me I don’t have rights to edit it, though I’ve done it before.

In the meantime, the primary network of Essex County is done. I’m moving on to the primary network of Union County.

5

Hello all. Just notice this post so I’ll go ahead and take Union County. But I’m going to focus more on the UR’s first and hit up the road type changes as I go along. Already did Morris and River Rd in Summit.

Once the wiki is ready, I’ll fill it in with what I’ve done.

6

Please focus on primary streets and any mH or MH that are not locked. When you update primary streets change locks to rank 2.
Thanks

7

Since I’ll be home on paternity leave for 3 weeks, I can start on Somerset County starting from Somerville and branching to neighboring towns.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

8

Sounds good. If you could focus on mH and lower, that would be great. MH+ is pretty much up to date in all of NJ except 4 counties in southern NJ which I am expecting to complete today.

9

I’ve found a couple of MH that still had LVL 1 locks. I set the, to 3 but if it needs higher, I’ll let you all know the locations.

Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk

10

I have everything in my usual area of Burlington and Mercer Counties covered. I started some work in Camden, and smaller scale work in Gloucester, Salem, Ocean, and Monmouth before the standards changed, so I’ll run through and adjust things accordingly.

EDIT: Mercer County is done. The entire county is a bloody web of highways.
EDIT 2: Burlington County is mostly done. My editing range is sketchy southeast of Medford and around Pemberton. I’ll finish that up when I can.
EDIT 3: Camden County will be next. I’ve gotten a bit of western Monmouth and Ocean Counties as well so far. Work in progress…

11

In Somerset, I’ve been through Raritan, Somerville, Finderne section of Bridgewater, Bound Brook and South Bound Brook. I’ll be heading into Franklin later today then back west to the Hillsborough area.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

12

I took a drive up to get back expired editing rights in some of Hunterdon and Somerset. I’ll be able to take care of everything I haven’t yet hit along CR-518 between Lambertville and Franklin Twp in the next day or so once my range opens up.

Down south, I also started work in Camden County, mostly in Pennsauken and Cherry Hill. Cherry Hill needs a lot of work due to its size and a lot of obsolete CDPs, but I’ll sort that out as I work on the function classifications.

Again, Mercer is done. Burlington is mostly done aside from some work around Pemberton and southeast of Medford. Camden is a WIP, and I’ll see what I can do about getting farther into Hunterdon, Monmouth, Ocean, and Gloucester. (Road trip!)

13

Ask for an AM area for those areas.
I’m going to create a wiki tomorrow to keep track all these changes for all editors. I’ll post here and/or NJ forum

14

I hate to rain a little on this parade but it must be said:

There are problems with the new scheme.

NJ Functional Classification maps are positively ancient. They don’t account for a lot of construction in the last decade. This affects not just the upgraded roads themselves, but previous primary routes that are obsolete (and should be downgraded) because of them.

Further, the DOT engineers were, ah, creative in their classifications. I have seen minor arterials that were too narrow for box trucks to pass each other in opposite directions, and with no rural Freeway classification available, the southern portion of the Garden State Parkway is only a Major Highway, not a Freeway.

Finally, the maps lack sufficient detail in many cases to properly determine the street route of the country-numbered roads. I spent 3 hours mapping a handful of county roads in Essex and Passaic because the route kept switching streets in a fairly dense road area.

Is anyone else experiencing these sort of difficulties?

15

We have in Arizona. The latest map was dated 2009. However, I got in contact with the Arizona DOT FC Coordinator and he provided me with current info on the fc in the state. He is also including me in update alerts for when the map gets updated and they have meetings.

Your best bet is to not only get in touch with NJ’s FC coordinator, but to agree with the rest of the NJ editors what the unofficial standard should be regard what to change.

Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk

16

For one thing, we have to stop thinking of roads in terms of entire routes, as the vast majority of them will not be the same FC type their entire length. This is especially true of county roads, for which portions could be Major Highway, portions could be Minor Highway, while other portions yet could be mere Primary Streets, depending on what they connect. State routes can also flip-flop between Major Highway and Minor Highway depending on what other roads they connect and where. Instead, it’s more practical, in terms of FC at least, to think of roads as regional networks, regardless of what kind/number route marker they may have:

  • Statewide, including roads that connect out of state like US Routes and Interstates (MH+)
  • County/Intercity (mH)
  • Crosstown (PS)
  • Local (S-)

We have to also remember that FC type assignments are based on percentages of all total public roads in any given area. That is, an X percentage must be Primary Arterial (or better), a Y percentage must be secondary arterial, and a Z percentage must be local collector roads. To meet this requirement, I’m sure engineers had to get really creative for what they chose as which types; for example, I have a neighborhood one-way street in Newark that is classified as secondary arterial (Waze Minor Highway) just because it goes straight through for over 2 miles and is longer than any other street in the immediate area. Does this mean it should be a minor highway? It’s a good question, because the street is certainly not a highway.

NJ FC maps are really bad at depicting how roads of various types are intended to connect with each other, instead just highlighting what roads are which type. However, particularly at junctions involving larger urban roads, there are often several connector segments, often routed over other nearby existing neighborhood streets, that you have to go over to get from one main road to another. This is a problem, because connectivity is one of the feature characteristics of using FC to begin with. If these entire paths are not made into either ramps or at least the lower of the 2 connecting road types, navigation through that junction could be disrupted for longer trips (and for NJ’s urban FC maps, longer trips are ones in excess of only like 5 or 6 miles). Further, this is actually a very complex concept for many lower- and even middle-ranked editors to get their heads around, and is consequently prone to all kinds of errors.

Finally, NJ’s FC maps are old, as in published before 2009, when updates to the FC standard unified the rules for determining FC road types in both rural and urban areas. Because of the separate rules used for urban and rural areas, we see many urban 2-lane roads with stop lights on every block, parked cars, low speed limits, etc., designated as Major Highways - same as multi-lane expressways mind you (no other commercial mapping system agrees with this, btw) - just because the road goes straight through more than one suburban town for 4 or more miles. I’m just not sure that’s what Waze intends with its Major Highway road type, and it’s certainly not what I envision when I think of an urban major highway.

However, despite bringing these concerns up numerous times, I’ve been told every time that none of these things matter, because as actual speed metric information of roads becomes more robust, all of these concerns about road type become secondary. Waze is still going to gravitate toward freeways if available even roughly in your direction (unless you tell it not to) for any trip longer than a few miles. So the FC/Route Type hybrid rule (whichever is higher for any segment) it is, at least until we can put together enough definitive cases to show it does not work.

17

Hi, PS,

Your description of FC is somewhat correct, but there are discrepancies to USDOT. (Serendipitously, I was asked to participate in a USDOT survey of traffic and highway access in this area.)

The DOT spec calls for designation to be based on “character of traffic (local or long distance)” and “degree of land access allowed” (close paraphrasing). In other words, they aren’t really based on speed, size, etc. They are based on how far you can go (MOBILITY) versus how much you can get to (ACCESS), using the road.

Local roadways provide “land access” - the network of roads that provides very little THROUGH traffic, but to reach destinations. Collectors and Arterials provide through traffic, differing in the length of trips and the amount of local access (non-through) traffic provided.

Separately, DOT has design guidance for how to construct the three classes (Local, Collector, Arterial). It is the FHA’s design principles that will make arterials wider, restricted access, etc., to allow greater speed over long distances, and to reduce congestion on collectors as well.

DOT maintains a list of typical attributes of the various roadway types, which include speed, density of “access points” (driveways, intersections, ramps), usage (traffic volume), width and lane count, continuity (connecting larger roads to both other large roads and networks of smaller roads) and route spacing. You may have been referring to route spacing when you mentioned density (you called it percentage) of total roads, but that’s not quite the same thing.

All the above is definitional. The actual process for deciding what classification to assign a road, you are correct that the network is the starting point. Regions are carved up, and you have to provide mobility and access within the area and to bordering areas, proportionate to the traffic generation characteristics of the region as a whole and the specific features within it.

Historical note: Many of the classification and design principles can be traced to Robert Moses. The current system learned from his successes (providing continuity in a region, developing networks of feeders) and failures (paying attention to existing uses, non-disruptiveness, improvements, and buffer zones).

Finally, if you carefully look at New Jersey’s FC for suburban areas (basically, the north and east parts of the state), you’ll find that it doesn’t really match the guidance.

/SOAPBOX

P.S. You’ve been told “every time” by a few advocates of the new Waze classification, system who happen to be in areas where it works better. I still think the system was hastily adopted, with not enough local input or trial. The whole system should have been vetted by having a few dozen regional areas, with a mix of existing routes being good, fair, and poor, then comparing route UR counts over time before and after a change-over. I’m sure we would have found successes and failures, which could have guided us in deciding what areas characteristically will benefit form this system, and what areas should not use it, or should use it judiciously.

18

Yup, the old urban FC types (though currently published for NY and NJ) are based strictly on percentage of total roads in the area and how far a road goes straight through. Curiously absent from this analysis is the actual capacity of the road. Incidentally, many of the 2-lane city-street Primary Arterials roughly follow the route of once-planned freeways or expressways that never got built because those towns rejected the construction (NJ law requires municipalities to consent to any construction the state plans to do with roads within their boundaries). As a result, the state is stuck having to designate urban Primary Arterial roads along 2-lane city streets, Secondary Arterials along one-way streets, etc.

There’s no doubt that the FC maps in some states serve the purposes of Waze much better than in others. However, there’s also a big push to standardize our editing policies nationwide, and I guess FC was thought to work adequately in enough places to go forward with a nationwide policy.

Are there any specific places with the new FC-based road types that we’ve seen, for sure, to not work right?

19

Take a quick look at Phoenix, AZ. Then Google Arizona Functional Classification map and search for the map from the AZDOT website, or better yet, the MCDOT-MSRP PDF which claims to have a more current map.

Because Arizona had space to grow, the ADOT decided to build the entire valley in a grid system. There are no County routes, only SR’s and freeways/highways. So many of the major roadways are given a Primary arterial classification. It looks confusing as hell but all of us editors in AZ are getting a better understanding on how they classified it.

Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk

20

I totally agree. We just have to get past the map looking radically different.

Like qwaletee said, the FC arterial types are more a function of how far a road goes through than their capacity. However, capacity, like the presence of signals, doesn’t matter to Waze because the collected speed data supersedes both. Instead, the road types help Waze determine which roads go how far, which is exactly the purpose of FC. The only exception are freeways, because with their total elimination of intersections, they provide for a much more accurate expected travel time.