As of September 2016 and the advent of the Waze Parking Project, these guidelines are obsolete. Please see here.
As per these guidelines, car parks should only be mapped as Places if they are general purpose and not for the sole use of customers. This means only town council car parks, NCP, park and ride, etc should be mapped as area places, so that anyone who drives to town centre location can find nearby parking that they know that can use.
Edit:the next version of the app will automatically show car parks when approaching the destination.
All supermarkets and businesses that provide dedicated parking for their customers should have the ‘Customer Parking’ service ticked, and no car park place drawn on the map. Users will be searching for a <place>, and Waze will use the combination of stop point and parking roads to navigate them to the appropriate parking.
On the UK map, there are 18,657 car park places, most of which were drawn a long time ago.
Of those car parks, 8,167 have no name. This is no help to anyone searching for parking, and is not distinguishable from other shaded areas on the map. There’s also another 2,817 car parks with the useless name of [P]. I estimate there’s at least another 1,000 car parks with generic names for the place they serve.
That means that 64% of car parks are incorrectly named, and almost all of them should be deleted from the map.
So, next time you see a car park, here’s a quick checklist to run through:
Does the car park comply with the three principles? Public, General and Significant
Does the car park have a proper name? E.g. “Queen St Car Park” (no [P]s please)
Have the car park roads been correctly added?
Is there a correctly named place for the building of the business(es) there?
I appreciate this comes across as rather harsh, but I’m making a point. Hopefully, with everyone working together with the same guidelines, we can bash these car parks in to shape.
Yes. All you should see at supermarket is an area place around the building, and a minimal set of parking roads. Possibly a separate place for the fuel station if there is one.
An airport is a special case, as users might want to choose between the different kinds of parking that is available. There’s also no danger that these will be mistaken as in-town parking for shoppers. Areas or points can be used for these.
Malls and Retails parks shouldn’t need to have separately marked car parks, as the parking roads should navigate drivers to the closest parking to the business they want to go to. See section about Shopping Centres on that wiki page.
I’ve found a few in my areas that we created a long time ago that I need to bring upto standard… I’m going to have a fun Sunday.
Just a quick question. In my area I have Telford shopping centre, this has several car parks (short and long stay). These are also used for people visiting other parts of town. At the moment each one is given its name (Red oak ect…) are these ok to stay, they serve the centre but, local people use them as meeting reference points.
I didn’t set it as my priority but just started to follow the guideline but…see this…
I deleted the car park and now it comes back and the ASDA place cannot be saved once you edited it :evil:
Time to bed and give it a try again tomorrow :mrgreen:
I have been thinking of adding the Farnham road parking since it is pay and display parking for the Shops. Max stay is either 2 or 4 hours. Do we map this since it runs either side of the road?
Note: the next* version of the app will automatically show car parks when approaching the destination.
So, it’s critical that we only show genuine car parks. Areas and Points work equally well.
(*you didn’t hear it from me, nudge nudge wink wink)
