I have been told by the SER ARC that the information on the At-grade connectors page under ‘Exceptions’ is not correct. I have deleted this information from the wiki under the “Be Bold” rule in the ‘Wiki Editing Etiquette’ page.
I’m open to discussion on this if anybody disagrees with my actions.
Thanks,
Major
Not a big deal since this doesn’t appear to be anything controversial and edits can be found in wiki’s history with some minor digging, but it would just help to know what information is being removed, when you do remove it, since it’s now not visible to review on the published side. Can’t open a discussion if you don’t know what was there to discuss :lol:
@majorjc_MS, what are you planning on changing? What is it originally and what will it be?
It’s visible in the page history: https://www.waze.com/wiki/USA/index.php?title=At-grade_connectors&diff=179305&oldid=177916&diffmode=source
Sorry, I should have included that information.
The previous page can be seen at this link. -> https://www.waze.com/wiki/USA/index.php?title=At-grade_connectors&oldid=177916
The current page can be seen at this link -> https://www.waze.com/wiki/USA/At-grade_connectors
I removed the section at the bottom listing the “Exceptions” where median crossing segments for MUTI, RCUT, DLT, and Jughandle were to be set at ‘Ramp’ road type. I also removed the references to this information in the above page text.
Yup, as I said, minor digging. But it would he helpful to have it here for the record or a link to it, which I’m glad has been provided.
Especially in those “why was this road setup this way” questions in the future where that standard was removed from the wiki in the past. It might be a lot to go back through all of the potential pages that standard could have been on and review the edit history of those pages trying to find it. Whereas it may be found here in a forum post much quicker and some one can either read the quote here or jump onto the provided link.
I actually think that the Exceptions section shouldn’t have been removed without a discussion as I see some cases there which are still in use. Perhaps the SER region doesn’t use them but this is a large section of a wiki page to just vanish without a discussion.
That’s a great point. At a minimum, there needs to be some mention of historical practices, even if they are now deprecated, so that editors can understand why a particular intersection might be set up in a way that doesn’t conform to current usage.
Ok, perhaps I jumped the gun on deleting this section. I edit in both SER and SCR and both of these regions use LS for these segments. Actually in SCR, we may even use PS, mH, or MH, depending on the type of roads these segments transition from/to.
Should I revert my edits until we can get some input from all of the USA regions on whether or not they use ‘ramp’ type for these AGCs and median crossing segments?
You mention cases that are still in use, may I ask which cases you are referring to and in what region?
So, if the consensus turns out to be that we are not using ‘ramp’ in these ‘exceptions’ then instead of deleting the section, we should change it to something like “Former practice” and leave the information on the page?
I work nightshift and I’m about to go to bed, so don’t think I’m ignoring any responses during the day. I will be back tonight. Please be patient with me, I took a long break from editing, and when I came back to it a lot of things had changed from the way we did things ten years ago. I just want to try to get some of these Wazeo pages up to current practices to help prevent others from spending several hours editing according to the wiki, and then having to go back and change all the new segments from ramp to LS, like I did.
RCUT, MUTI J-turn and similar intersections are often used to reduced collisions. Depending on where you are editing the RC in RCUT might mean Reduced Conflict, Reduced Collision, or Restricted Crossing.
Where the road type matters in the context of the AGC article is Ramp is often used because it accomplishes two things, It prevents pruning and it also hides the road name in the app. Both are important in the use of the Ramp type.
These intersections are unique in that your’e essentially replacing a simple left or straight through movement with a multiple turns that may include a U-turn. Typically when we do a U-turn pruning is not a factor because we have either just started a trip or nearing a destination. With these intersections the U-turn can be in the middle of a trip so pruning can be a factor. I have personally mapped RCUTs in the middle of nowhere, they are useful when two high speed perpendicular roads meet because instead of crossing traffic perpendicularly you merge, thus reducing the conflicts. One segment of a route that breaks road type continuity would mean that route gets pruned.
The second part is the road name. Often these RCUTs (and similar) can be signed for what would have been a left turn and the straight through movements in addition to the simple U-turn. In effect you can have three different movements signed sometimes with control cities. This makes the Ramp type ideal for use because it hides these unwieldy names in the app and Ramp type does not have an affect on punning. Granted now, we could do away with the road names and just use TTS overrides and visual instructions but that still doesn’t address the pruning aspect.
I’m not as familiar with the continuous flow intersections but I imagine there would be similar considerations for the Ramp type.
Considering there are many segments mapped to this current standard using Ramp type I would not want to see these exceptions removed from the wiki without the above considerations being addressed somewhere in the AGC wiki. So yes, for now I would like to see the Exceptions section that was removed added back.
Thanks. 
I have reverted my previous edits. In the next few days/weeks I will work on a revision of this section and put it on my ‘talk’ page and post here for review and more discussion.
Thanks
I will add that these types of AGC that I’ve added, even recently, have been mapped using the ramp type for the reasons listed above. Even in what you quoted from driving79, she notes that ramp is used in places. It seems her message was about a specific place where ramp was used and it should have been something else, not that all of the exceptions using ramp should be removed from the wiki.
Yes, I see that now. This section needs to be fleshed out with more detailed information and guidance for when to use ramp and other road types and information on ‘pruning’ as mentioned by @ojlaw, which I have heard of, but I don’t know what it is.
When I deleted this section from the wiki, I had just finished dividing a 6 mile stretch of road and added several RCUTs and such as ‘ramp’ type and then the next day I saw that they had all been changed to LS by @driving79. That’s when I asked her about that and received the answer quoted in my first post.
The SER page does not have region specific guidance for these segments and the national guidance is not specific enough. The current page just says to use ramp type.
Any input, or region specific information that you, or anyone else reading this, can provide will be greatly appreciated as I try to revise this information.
Major
I just want to be clear that I only know what SER was/is doing and what I had seen in other regions. I have not done any recent research in other regions to know if those have changed on this. I was not aware this was going to attempt to be changed on a national level until this was posted. I’m all for a consensus, but I have not done any research. I am also happy to update the SER wiki and this can be closed.
On a related note, maybe it’s time to revisit Kent’s guidelines to wiki editing. Right or wrong, I’m pretty sure we are at a point that “Be bold” isn’t the desired norm.
Just noticed the first two Exceptions don’t seem to match the description on the Discuss. Am I missing something? It says to set them to ramp type, but the image doesn’t reflect that.
In the first example ramp is used in some of them, 2 of 4 that don’t also have a left turn. 
If you have PLs handy where we can grab screenshots we can get the images updated.
Edit - Link to wiki section -At-grade connectors