Hi,
What’s the best way of reporting a postcode polygon error?
When using Waze to get to a destination by postcode, it took me to the wrong road on the other side of a railway track, which had no houses on it. This is probably the root of the problem, as postcodes are allocated to houses and not areas so polygons have to be generated from the postcode points, and where there is sparse housing they are poorly constrained.
Anyway, I’ve put a comment in the map editor explaining the error, at 50.996, -1.45188, which is where Waze took me to, that describes where it should have taken me to.
Tim
Moved to UK forum
Map comment found https://www.waze.com/en-US/editor?env=row&lon=-1.45188&lat=50.99600&zoom=8&mapComments=234947070.-1945168916.972342
Hi Tim, the simple answer is you need to report it to the service that supplies the data, in this case Google Maps.
Waze doesn’t natively support postcode navigation, if you include a postcode in the search Waze will only ever take you to the closest point to the centre of the postcode area (which can cover large number of properties or long lengths of road) as supplied by Google data. Waze is designed to navigate to road names and business names.
Thanks John for the move / permalink 
OK, I didn’t realise that on the postcodes.
But if I type in the address:
Oak Corner, Crampmoor Lane, Crampmoor
it doesn’t seem to have house names, and isn’t smart enough to look for the road name in the address, so directs me to a choice of the village or crampmoor garage.
(A number of houses in the lane do have a name attribute as they are set up as a place, but the category of all of them is lodging and looking at the other categories it looks like this should apply to paid for accommodation, whereas they are private houses - and Waze’s search doesn’t find them anyway)
If I just do Crampmoor Lane, Crampmoor it does find the road, but as it’s a mile or two long that’s pretty rubbish! On a par with the very early satnavs that could only direct you to the first part of the postcode.
And I can’t even get round it by setting a favourite by position in the app - I have the same problem with where I live, though the error is only a quarter of a mile in my case.
So, even if the postcode data is Google’s responsibility, this is definitely an area for improvement for Waze - it’s about the same as we were doing some 10 years ago when I was doing stuff very similar to Waze when they started, but in the UK!
Tim
You may have discovered that Waze now finds the properties that Chris (@atrophicshiner) has added to the map; you do have to go to the further page of Search by selecting ‘More results for:…’.
If you then select ‘Search results’ rather than ‘Places’, named properties in Crampmoor Lane generally appear as the first item.
Oak Corner happens to be one that he has not added, (probably no bin outside when the Google StreetView camera went past, or whatever other method he used to identify the properties!), but as a Waze user you have editing rights in the area that you have driven and could usefully add the missing addresses in the street. They would probably have to be moderated and cleared by another editor to begin with but that’s how we all got hooked. It’s out of my area otherwise I would be going for the points 
:roll:
BTW: I have been advised that the use of ‘Lodging’ is inappropriate and Private houses should be classed as ‘Other’ in order to avoid being found in searches for paid accommodation.
(I add such in the ‘Description’ field when adding ‘Places’ rather than numbering houses). The Grovely Way houses can be found by number.
As a final point the postcode pin found by Doogal.co.uk differs from the position you originally posted - Google map permalink. Quite why may be to do with your ‘polygon’ comment.
I added some of the named properties to this road on 14th December, but due to work schedule couldn’t add them all, which I hope to do soon.
As for category to use we don’t have one for named private residences so I generally use Lodging as this is a Primary category which we shouldn’t use for actual paid for accommodation as they have their own secondary category.
We asked developers to use a better, open source, postcode database but we were flatly refused as it wasn’t a priority, I have even submitted detailed suggestion in Waze’s beta program but this has so far (5 months) not been looked at.
Yes, the search is behaving, and I added the missing house.
It does seem a bit of a fudge to the data structure to put private house names into a Lodging category!
Tim
Would it be possible for Waze HQ to ask Google Maps to open up the editing of UK postcodes?
Chris, do you know if something like this has been suggested?
At the moment there is no way to edit an incorrect postcode location in Google Maps, and any requests regarding postcodes is just ignored.
I doubt Google Maps have any editability in their postcode data, they probably just use the raw data provided by Royal Mail/Ordnance Survey. With this data being updated quarterly it would be quite a job to review any manually altered postcodes for potential updates.
There are 2 kinds of Postcode data, the free Code-point Open which just gives the centre point of the postcode, or the licenced Code-point with Polygons.
It stands to reason that Google are happy to pass on the free data to Waze but retain any paid-for polygon data for their own products. Wether a free app like Waze would consider paying for the more accurate polygon data is another discussion.
Also worth remembering that postcode navigation in Waze works perfectly fine for the vast majority of cases, which is probably why Google/Waze aren’t bothered. We only see the tiny few cases where the location is off by enough to cause a navigation issue, or its a new postcode for a new estate.
As you guys probably know, the postcode data isn’t a polygon, rather each postcode is a set of points for the postal addresses included.
Naive approaches to generate polygons from this are typically to create a polygon from the outer set of points for each postcode, and then fill in the gaps between these polygons by growing them until they meet somewhere in the middle. Then the point of the postcode is often taken as the centroid of the expanded polygon.
Setting the point to be the centroid of the original postcode points is an easy way of fixing most problems. That would have fixed it in this case, for example, as the houses with the same postcode will lie along the same road (plus side roads etc).
To be even more robust, when generating the polygons this also needs to be constrained by roads, bearing in mind that each postcode is a group of houses accessible by the postie. So, for example, a polygon won’t include an area that is accessible by a parallel road.
Anyway, that’s down to Google 
Tim
Thanks!
I just randomly checked some recent problematic post codes like
KT16 0EE
HP14 3PE
PO10 7QY
They are all pointed correctly in Code-point Open, in Royal Mail and in postcodes.io
Therefore I think Google Maps has it’s own postcode database, because they are the only ones that have it wrong.
Whenever the location is wrong in Waze, it is also wrong in Google Maps navigation. So it is not a question of what quality data Google Maps give to Waze. It is just wrong in Google Maps.
They generally have a tendency to put the point too far away, so it ends up on a motorway for example.