Yea, I agree that, in a way, option (B) is more robust to change in an entrance road. That is why I think that there should be a high-level lock on the private entrance segments of option (A).
You know, in a way this debate about failure of roads is not too bad because there is a gate or guard that will turn around anyone who tries to get in! :lol:
Wow, that is a really elegant and simple way to put it. I will adopt that in my proposal.
I agree that all private does not work for where the base includes roads higher than street. But I my opinion, there is no need for primary streets or higher on the vast majority of campuses. Primary streets are used to show the best route through town. The whole point of the discussion is waze should not be routing through the base. I understand the speed issue making roads disappear for the user, but I really see that a client issue not a map issue. But for really big campuses where there is a real need for higher type roads, this could be the best method. I still think this should be the exception and not the rule.
I works for me.
I do not go on and off a private campus. But there are a ton of them around. I frequently deal with URs at Fort Meade, Fort McNair, the White House, Washington Navy Yard, Bolling, the Naval Academy, Goddard SFC, National Institutes of Health, etc. At one point these were handled with short either parking lot segments or private road segments at their entrances or exits. It was difficult to maintain because everytime someone changed an entrance or exit and didn’t get it right, they would ruin the routing on or off the campus. When the campuses are private roads, I see many fewer URs.
Well, that’s not what the Army tells us local civilians.
I suspect that this is where we will need to work out this out. I don’t see the advantage of having secondary roads within Ft. Meade, as from where I sit the whole point is you do not need to provide roads for driving through the base. Then again, I don’t drive on the base.
Andy, In addition to the above, thanks for the other ideas about how to implement. I think that is important.
BTW: Sorry I had to step out during your presentation at the meetup–the functional-to-waze mapping showed some interesting results that should have positive global (i.e., national) effect, especially if some automated process occurs, but even with dedicated senior editors.
@CBenson and others, thanks for the debate and ideas around this topic. I think it is starting to add a more complete concept around the use of private roads for various “installations” from small private communities to huge military bases.
I think this point and some made by AndyPoms may be one of the root issues of disagreement. You both somewhat indicated that the whole point is NOT to route through the base. I disagree, and extend that to any installation.
There are a lot of people that work on these facilities (gov or private-sector) or live there too. Bases house our military families. Are we supposed to ignore these people?
I would think just like us, they would want to route to and from their home and work. They would like to have the most efficient routing and traffic help on an “installation” particularly for really large ones. Don’t we want to help them too?
If you agree that is something we should do, then just saying our purpose is to avoid routing the general public there is not quite as clear, and something to which I disagree. I agree we want to not route the general public through one of these, but even if we consider that primary, a very close secondary is serving the people that work and live on these installations.
Yea, there are a ton of them around, which is a really good argument for having some standard approach that provides inquisitive editors a resource rather than finding nothing. I think that with your help I am starting to see clarity on your points and differentiation between different places. I drive on and off such a site every day I go to work.
Yes–in the DC area, there are a lot of them. I have been on all these installations you mention and driven around them except NIH. There are others that are larger, like Andrews, Boling AFB, etc. The WH and internals of OEOB next door have roads but it is too small. I could see all private roads there. I have also been to many larger installations out west and in HI on Pearl and Hickam.
I think one difference I see out west is that some of these tend to be much larger. All these larger installations, mostly AFB types, have primary roads that are essential to routing and an effective map. White Sands is huge and has highways. In CA, NV, and UT there are a number of larger installations. There are some in Idaho as well.
That larger installation view is probably biasing my drive to have something more encompassing and a duty by editors to do more than just keep people from routing onto them.
I agree that would be the case, but a simple solution is locking the segments.
Yea, my bias and mistake again. I know there is a lot more on Ft Meade than just that one agency.
Yea–again I think this uncovers the different perspectives we’ve both been providing. The advantage of having them is serving those who work there. I’ve driven Ft Meade all over and can see where a couple primary streets might work. I can also see how just normal roads would suffice. That is not as big of a facility as others.
I agree that on very large bases all private roads may not be the way to go.
Yes, we want to help and not ignore the people who live and work on base. But I don’t really see how having higher type roads improves the efficiency of routing or traffic help to those on the base. As I see it the higher types of roads are used to indicate the roads that are to be used to route through an area. Street type roads are fine for roads that are only used by the locals. By definition, locals only use the roads behind the restricted access gates. Thus, I don’t see the problem in essentially using street type (or in this case private road type). If the base is so large that waze can’t find a route from one end to the other using private roads, then of course we should not be using all private roads.
No issue with this. But I continue to believe that the standard should be to make private campus out of private roads and the exception should be for huge bases.
I’m rather anti-lock. I prefer the local user to be able to maintain the gate configuration than to have it set from on high. But the bigger problem is that you typically (at least around here) need to lock far more than the actual entrances or exits. The typical private installation around here has a multitude of roads that look from the aerial photos like entrances or exits but in fact have a fence/concrete barrier/etc. permanently blocking the road (quite frequently in a configuration deployed after the aerial photos and other information available on the internet). If a neophyte editor connects one of these roads, under (A) all routes on and off the entire base will use that erroneous connection. Under (B) only those routes where the connection is actually a reasonable route (in the absence of the fence) will be routed this way. The errors under (B) seems to me to be less disruptive to users on the bases just based on my reading of the harshness of the messages added to the URs before and after all private roads have been used. (This is not an entirely fair conclusion as there have been many other improvements to the waze experience during this time as well.)
That is the biggest that I typically deal with. If there is really a need for primary streets and highways on a base, then of course you can’t use all private roads. But except for preventing the road from disappearing at higher speeds on the client, I’m not seeing the advantage to having the primary street on the base.
There are four situations in routing when dealing with Private facilities.
With the existing system of all roads being private, all 4 systems will work without a problem. It allows routing onto and off of the base. It will prevent routing through the base - this will prevent unauthorized personnel from accessing secure areas. It allows routing internal to the base.
The issue is only with facilities with extra security levels.
You still haven’t answered my question from above:
Bethel Valley Rd just inside of the eastern gate shows speeds of 54.1/42.3 in the editor (yes, I know we can’t fully trust those numbers). Other segments include 51.6/51.6 and 54.1/36. So some people are hauling ass inside the gates.
And yes, I think the perimeter may grow… there were two breaches just this weekend. Some guy riding his bike along a patrol road and another guy “Stepped across the line” while reading signs at one of the gates. And the break in a few months back by 3 senior citizens (including a nun) is still fresh in everyone’s mind. :lol:
I’ll just comment back on a few things. What I’d like to do is take all your concepts and modify the first post with your input and then go from there. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished. Before then, a few replies to your message…
Again, I agree and disagree. Small installations/communities can be done with all private. Even moderate bases should have primary and secondary roads, or highways based upon size. They should be marked like we would a town, because, they are a town. The standard is to use a city name to distinguish a base location. They are literally towns, for instance, Quantico in your area.
While this may have been the standard, and I can agree with you there at times, things are going to change. We learned at the meetup that all roads will be locked automatically to a level based upon the usage of that road. So, what that means to me is that your intent (even though I agree in a way with it) is not what works. Waze is going to lock a vast number of roads because of damage lower level editors can do. The more “important” a road, the higher it will be locked. This makes perfect sense. In addition, editors will be able to set the lock level. So, finding ways to make a road structure logically robust (the “hack” of making all roads private in my opinion), is not going to be as important.
Yup. Agree this can happen. In fact, I had a low-level editor make such a connection in a really dumb place and all of the sudden everything routed me through that location to a base when I was going to work. Yes, it can happen.
The approach to use solid private roads is a hack to me in some circumstances, a really cool hack by the way because of this robustness you mention. It just doesn’t work all the time. Take a look at my revision when I finish it because I am going to include this approach.
I also think it is somewhat unsupportable argument direction because users can make so many errors in roads in private communities that have no private areas. They will route new roads from subdivisions through what looks like a street that is not, or though a street that was eliminated and gone at low zoom levels but exists at the highest zoom level… users are going to mess up all over the place. We get notified and have to go fix it.
I didn’t really consider that reason. I think we need it, at larger installations, because it routes appropriately and we need to serve those who use those larger bases. For instance, White Sands Missile Range is 3200 square miles (3x the size of RI and 60 percent of CT). It has minor highways, primary streets, secondary streets. If we mark everything as normal streets, the routing will really be poor.
Andy – I respectfully disagree. This sounds like a rather definitive comment which I believe to not fully reflect what goes on in such areas–including massive private hunting facilities, military bases/ranges, and large gov facilities.
I agree with the four cases you mentioned. But all of them can fail if we don’t have secondary and highway roads. I guess the best way to make that case is that if you apply this logic to any town of the same size and complexity as a base, then why not just use all street roads in towns?
Answer: Waze wouldn’t get the correct routing. We should be routing people on primary streets and highways, not roads, if it saves time. Waze needs to know that information.
…I’ll start working on a revision that includes use of all private roads for smaller facilities and see what you all think. Thanks for this input.
Yea, I know about the nun thing. I had not heard of the recent issues.
Is Bethel Valley Rd close to another road outside the area that has fast traffic? There was discussion of how errors in GPS signals can bleed speed to nearby roads…
I just thought of another issue while typing up the new proposed approach… dirt roads. If you mark everything private, then you don’t have the ability to distinguish dirt roads and regular streets. Yea, some may not care about that, but the consequence of making everything private is less resolution and less service in Waze for those who use such facilities.
My company’s HQ is within ORNL (although I haven’t been there in forever), and I know Bethel Valley Road is itself is within the boundaries of ORNL. Once you get past the east portal inside the perimeter, the speed limit does go back up and it is a straight shot for about a mile, so people do speed up until you get to the main buildings of ORNL, where the speed limit drops. Bethel Valley is NOT close to other fast roads and isn’t subject to GPS signal bleed.
Although the ORNL campus isn’t as large as many other military installations, I would think that Bethel Valley would be listed as a Primary Road (once inside the portals) and the other roads would be more minor roads (streets / PL). Having all roads to be listed as private would not be as helpful within its boundaries.
Opps… sorry. In my experience there are only usually two levels of security, but I have seen three. The first level is general access to the installation, like an air force base. The second level is access to a particular resident of the base, like an agency, a tenant of the base. A base can have many military tenants and many other government agency tenants. The second level size could be a square mile, but is often smaller.
As to the use of parking lot roads in such a facility, one could do that, but often times the roads in such a facility have real street names and there are parking lots for each building. It is possible for roads to be dirt as well as paved.
I would rather not hack the road network and just mark things parking lot when they are not parking lot roads. If the facility was just a bunch of parking lots with unnamed roads and a few buildings, then I could see using the approach you mentioned.
Some of these restricted access areas are whole cities and communities with stores, gas stations, schools, churches, etc.
I had a chance to look at this in the editor. I see everything is private roads. It does not implement the actual security on the base, so it doesn’t really work due to multiple zones. I guess this doesn’t really matter because people on base would know or be stopped. Come to think of it, it’s not our place to understand or insert that detail all the time.
OK, here is a second cut at the guidance. I didn’t read it over for mistakes or omissions of your ideas more than once or twice. Kinda late.
Can you give any example of any of them failing? I don’t see why they fail. Thus, I see no reason to have secondary highway roads. I’d be perfectly happy to use all street roads in towns (in fact I would prefer to). The reason I don’t is that waze won’t route through the town at all if you do use all street roads. (If you do use all streets in a town, waze will route to the town, waze will route from the town, waze will route within the town, waze just will not route through the town.) As you don’t want to route through a private base this is not a problem for a base.
Everything? Nope.
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=8&lon=-76.76188&lat=39.09661&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=67369226
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=7&lon=-76.75963&lat=39.09776&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=71605137
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=9&lon=-76.75919&lat=39.10778&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=64982505
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=6&lon=-76.76294&lat=39.10783&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=71605078
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=8&lon=-76.76875&lat=39.10786&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=66265109
https://www.waze.com/editor/?zoom=8&lon=-76.77043&lat=39.10616&layers=BFTFFTTTFTTFTFFTFTTTTFT&segments=66265088
Which is why waze doesn’t route from on the base through the NSA campus: http://www.waze.com/livemap/?zoom=13&lat=39.10299&lon=-76.76005&layers=BTTTTT&from_lon=-76.760706973313&from_lat=39.111086325071&from_seg=22126555&to_lon=-76.777272296183&to_lat=39.113433869776&to_seg=22105655
I guess I don’t really understand your message on routing. This is getting sufficinetly complex it might be easier to talk voice about this.
What I thought I was saying (may have not been clear) is that I thought AndyPoms did a great job of outlining use cases to test…the four routing options. I just didn’t agree with his conclusion after that because it was absolute, and I think incorrect for some reasons.
What I said (or was trying to say) is that full routing for the four “can fail” (not that they must) without the use of secondary and highway roads. The mode of failure is that routing will not necessarily work without Waze knowing which roads are primary and highways. It could route your through streets that are not optimal in moving you from one place to the other, depending of course, on how Waze decides to do routing that day. If roads have speed data, then maybe that would work just fine. It certainly would not be clear to a person looking at the map and seeing which roads were better to travel than others. I do that all the time because I don’t always blindly follow a route or don’t always have routing on.
My whole point was that we need secondary and highway roads in larger installations that are larger than the smaller states in the USA. If the logic holds that private roads are good enough, then let’s only use streets in RI, DE, Washington DC, which are smaller than these bases.
Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I had trusted / misinterpreted that all the roads within a private installation like Ft. Meade would be private. I just poked around there but didn’t look at detail at the gates. I thought this is the standard that AndyPoms and others were advocating… a solid private road system.
What I see you’ve implemented is a combination of mostly private roads with small normal street segments, and there are some parking lot roads. I will look more to understand. Here’s my guess now:
A private - street - private transition acts just like a street - private - street transition in blocking routing. The difference is that the former is more “robust” in that most of the roads are private. Is that correct. I think you mentioned before that you could implement zoned access this way. It’s kind of like the mirror of the approach I was suggesting.
Here’s an important question:
A lot of the argument on this board is for all-private roads for at least smaller installations or private communities rather than a private gate road segment. From what I have seen this private - street - private approach is also subject to a novice editor deleting or changing (because they thought it was a mistake perhaps) and causing inaccurate routing problems. Right? That seems like a problem too.
The only difference is that it is a little more “robust” in that more roads are private. The novice error would cause routing through various zones, but not necessarily from public roads.