Hi everyone,
As a new Waze editor here in Calgary, (5000 pts, 755 edits) I’m wondering if anyone can suggest a productive task regarding editing the map?
Parking lot roads seem to be overly mapped, but that’s fine in my mind… if you start Waze in a mall parking lot, it directs you to the best exit of the parking lot for your route.
But there is only so much of that to be done.
I took a try at adding house numbers, but that gains you so little points, it just isn’t worth it.
Anyways, I am happy to continue what i have been doing, but I was just wondering if anyone had some suggestions to be productive regarding the map.
It’s possible to have too many parking lot roads in a parking lot. The established practice is to put in only the main roads, so that the map doesn’t get cluttered with every lane of a 5,000 car parking lot.
If you go outside the city in virtually any direction you will find that the range and township roads need a lot of work. Doctorkb, the local area and country manager, pointed this out when I joined, and despite the work I’ve been doing (with over 110k edits and 450k points), there’s still tons to be done there. If you have an add-on like WME Validator (see the “addons & scripts” sub-forum in the WME editor forum), it will highlight any issues (a lot of them have either incorrect one-way routing or “unknown” routing configured). Another thing that needs to be done to range and township roads is changing the lion’s share of them from Primary Street to either Street or Dirt Road. Doc, with the new policies regarding road type definitions in Calgary and Edmonton, do you have any input on how you’d like to see range and townships done? I suppose Street for paved roads and Dirt Road for unpaved is most appropriate.
What I’ve been doing myself is setting them to Street, two way, unless i’ve physically driven on them and now they are gravel, then i put them on dirt. If i’m out of my home area an easy way to mark them for myself later is to just put a UR in marked gravel, then i change the road type, and lock them.
My feeling is that we need to keep a number of them as Primary Street. Perhaps not all of them, but in order for long distance routing to work, you have to be able to complete everything up to the last few km on something above PS.
FWIW, “Dirt” and “Primary Street” route the same, with the exception of the dirt road avoidance in the app.
I would suggest every 0-numbered road be a primary, since they’re on a zero-based grid. 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240, etc. There isn’t necessarily a 0-numbered road in each group (for example in my area, you have Twp 232, Twp 234, Twp 240, Twp 241, Twp 242, Twp 244, and Twp 245) but it should be enough to meet the need.
Even though range and township roads have different appearances on signs (i.e. Township Road 232 vs Township Road 32-0 vs Township Road 67.0), they’re all on the same grid.
There are only two places I know of, at least in southern Alberta, where range and township roads aren’t used. One is the Municipal District of Foothills, just south of Calgary, where they use a modified extension of the City of Calgary streets and avenues system (avenues extend numerically from the city limits at ~220 down into the 600-700s at the south end of the M.D., and streets are offset somewhat east-and-west because the M.D. considers a different road to be the “center point” compared to Calgary). The other is in the Municipal District of Taber, near the hamlet of Hays, where a number of rural roads surrounding Hays, not in a grid pattern, use a “proprietary” naming structure (like HAYS RD 70 S for example). And of course the First Nations reserves which generally don’t use range and township roads either.
But for all the places where the standard range and township roads are in use, I’d recommend my above idea.
While it would be fun to poke around and fix some of the rural roads, my limited editing area makes that difficult. Is there a way to increase my editable area, even temporarily, so I could work on roads that I’ll probably never drive on? Or roads I may have driven on pre-Waze? Other than the obvious answers of “drive more” and “edit more”.
Jay, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by 0-numbered road: do you mean roads whose numbers end with the digit 0? That is, the ones around the perimeter of each township?
If that’s what you mean, I don’t agree with making those ones “primary” and the rest “street.” I don’t think there is any real-world tendency for those roads to be better than other range and township roads.
What I have been doing is marking roads “dirt” when I can verify from Street View or personal experience that they’re gravel. If they are paved or I can’t tell their pavedness/gravelness, I make them “primary” if they are connected to other grid roads at both ends, and “street” if they are dead ends or lead only to loops and dead ends.
By the way I am surprised how difficult it can be sometimes to judge paved from gravel with StreetView.
I’m good with this idea too. However, the tricky part here is that a lot of older basemap data has every road “allowance” (the right-of-way a road WOULD take if it was built) put in; and whatever Waze used to build the basemap seems to like putting driveways (everything from 10m long stubs to multi-kilometer ranch access roads) in.
As an aside, there’s a practice which appears to have been part of the original basemap, so it may have been automated, but it drives me up the wall… a road will have two tiny primary-street stubs, only a few meters in length, at an intersection, and the rest of the road (or driveway) is connected as type street. Just another node and segment that has to be touched to fix all this.
Yes, those short segments are annoying. But I figured out where they come from: they mark the transition from pavement to gravel when there is brief paved apron at the intersection of a gravel road and a paved road.
That’s another way I use to distinguish pavement from gravel. But I do not leave those short segments behind; I mark the whole road as gravel and delete those intersections.
i’ve been abolishing the short sections also, but, i’ve been changing all the ones down near me to “street” unless they are the primary street running through a town which does happen out here in no mans land from time to time.
is the 0 idea as primary an accepted standard? Or are we just tackling this in general?