Searching the forums, I haven’t found anything on this topic, so I wonder what thoughts others may have on this topic.
While I’m driving through the parking lot at my office, Waze frequently notices how slow I’m driving, and asks me if there is a traffic issue. I also notice that Waze frequent shows low speeds (9-18 mph) on the main road (El Camino Real in Santa Clara, CA) even though I can look out my window and see traffic moving normally. It appears that Waze confuses parking lot movements with the main road traffic. How does Waze distinguish between the two?
The intuitive-to-me solution would be to use mapped parking lot roads to locate vehicles off the thoroughfares and neglect them from the traffic computations. However, that seems to be at odds with users who find parking lot roads to be obsessive-compulsive clutter.
Alternatively, if the Waze app happens to send GPS DOP data back to the system, that might be a good way to discard outliers before putting them into the traffic speed computation. However, I haven’t seen mention of such methods in any Waze discussions so far.
My understanding is that this is the waze solution despite the clutter, which is why there are parking lot roads on the map. There are some other issues with mapping parking lots other than mere clutter.
I have significant questions regarding the properties of the “parking lot” segment type. One issue with mapping parking lot roads is that typically you don’t want waze to use them for routing in lieu of actual public streets. Accordingly, it appears that waze has a very high penalty for routing over each “parking lot” segment. This penalty can wreak some havoc on routing to locations internal to the parking lot where the logical route would take multiple “parking lot” segments. Thus it may be better to just use “parking lot” segments at the entrances to parking lot so routing to any internal location in lot will traverse only one “parking lot” segment. The issue with this approach is that some editors have noticed that turn restrictions are not always properly honored from “parking lot” segments.
There is some speculation at this point that the “private road” segment will prevent routing and could be used for parking lots. However, waze has also stated that where a “parking lot” segment is the last segment a wazer is snapped to the wazers data will not create jam notifications. There is no indication that the “private road” segment has this property.
The other approach that the waze team was taking at one point was to use parking lot landmarks, which also supress the jam notifications. However, many editors seem to feel that the parking lot landmarks are worse clutter that parking lot roads.
All this being said I will map parking lots to prevent the low speeds in the lot from attaching to the main roads. It seems that every couple of weeks I change the precise approach I take to avoid clutter when mapping lot based on the changing information regarding “parking lot” and “private road” segments.
According to the Wiki (http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Road_Types_(USA)#Parking_Lot_Road) don’t map the individual rows in the parking lot but do map the main road(s) through the lot as well as the entrances & exits…