As some of you may know, the majority of roads in Okinawa are too narrow to drive two cars down side by side, yet the local government designates them as two way roads. This leads to people having to get over as far as they can to let the other car pass (sometimes nearly hitting a wall or even getting into the entrance of another road). This, in combination with the lack of map editors in the area and the already misshapen roads (the majority of which have not been touched since 2012), leads to a lot of routing issues on the island while using waze.
I also believe the this is the reason for a lot of the traffic accidents that happen on the island. People try using their GPS to navigate, and it thinks that a street is a normal sized one, ultimately leading them down a narrow road (possibly with a dead end in the middle of a cemetery) and they don’t know what to do.
waze has the capability of marking those roads as narrow and routing people around them. However, there are hundreds of thousands of roads, which is way to many for me to handle on my own. This is why I would like to start a MapRaid in Okinawa to fix all of these issues.
I have been in contact with my Community Manager and they gave me the link to the MapRaid registration form, but it requires the usernames of champs to run raid.
Is there anyone that would be willing to help run the raid? As stated, no one in the area is very active so it will probably have to be someone from somewhere else.
Main issues in Okinawa:
-Roads geometries do not match (some not even close)
-Some dead-end roads connect to others when they should not
-Several of the roads are not categorized correctly (Primary street, major/minor highways, narrow streets, etc.)
-Some of the island appears underwater in the waze drawn/stylized map
-Several parking lots and parking lot roads not listed/drawn
-The majority of roads that I have seen don’t have names attached to them (marked as no street name)
Most of my student friends at the University study Japanese, while I don’t know or study it myself they’ve often shared their passion for the country with me and I’ve traveled to Japan twice for that reason. Some of my friends even now work with travel agencies that specialize in that destination. I’ve personally never been to Okinawa though, but nevertheless I’d be happy to provide my username as mapraid Champ for the request form.
Out of curiosity, did you speak of this at all with Japanese Champs? (like taka, awonorisan or yukion?)
I did not, I just received contact information from another user for my community manager, contacted them and then received a link. I will try and contact them and update everyone here when I get a response. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes…
Thank you all for your quick responses. I am going to try and contact the local champs, so I don’t step on their toes. However, everyone here will still be included in the fun.
As an update, I have yet to receive a reply from the Japanese champ that I contacted. I will be filling out the for sometime today (Local Okinawa Time). Thank you all again for your interest and help!
I have recently helped to update and improve a commonly used registration google sheets doc for another raid and I would be willing to help out with that as well for this project. I may not speak Japanese, but I do speak excel
If help is needed, the Uruguay community of editors is at your disposal. We can help with roads and geometry, but I thing that language and roads name will be for local editores.
Last year I was in Tokyo, and walk arround the roads that you mention, I understan exactly what you mean, specially if you are walking and see a truck coming to you and you have no place to go.
I believe that first it deserves the approval of the community of Waze in Okinawa, the community of Uruguay is ready to collaborate in case of organizing this instance of MMR, in the preparation and in the field work!
