Santa Cruz county closures

Map Editors Community United States California
1

Hey Guys!

We’ve been contacted by some drivers in the Santa Cruz area, saying there are missing closures in waze.
I tried to get more details but it seems the closures are an on/off issue based on road conditions due to landslide.

I got this link which is supposed to be updated with all the changes in the area:
http://www.sccroadclosure.org/

And from what I understood the main issue is with: Mountain Charlie Road

We will greatly appreciate your help in updating the map accordingly.
Please let me know if you need more information, I will do my best!

Thank you!

2

Hi, I am an R5 editor who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Believe me, I am intimately familiar with the flooding and road damage we’ve suffered due to a series of heavy rainstorms. I’m also well acquainted with the Santa Cruz County road-closure website.

First, that website is helpful, but far from perfect. Many times I’ve found it showing roads as closed that in fact opened 1-3 days earlier.

Second, many of the closures in our area result from fallen trees, which are usually cleared within hours. By the time the website shows such a closure (much less gets noticed by a volunteer editor), chances are that the clearing effort is already underway. The website will then continue to show the closure for 1-3 days even if it’s clear.

Third, the website gives no estimate of opening time, so we have to guess, and of course we usually guess wrong.

So, we’ve learned not to place too much trust in that website! As a result of its limitations, I’ve focused my energy on applying closures only once I’m sure they are long-term. I personally prioritize through roads where the detours would be significant.

That leaves short-term closures. Unfortunately, the Waze app’s crowdsourced closure system works very poorly in our mountains. Once one begins to travel a segment and encounters a problem, the app does not provide any means to close it. Even after one turns around and retraces one’s route to the nearest junction, Waze still won’t allow you to close it, apparently because it’s seen that you’ve traveled it. Also, many areas in our mountains have poor cell coverage. So to the great regret and frustration of local Wazers, we were unable to use Waze effectively to mark closures due to down trees, slides, and washouts. It would have been so useful!

Regarding Mountain Charlie specifically: this is a narrow, twisting, lightly-maintained mountain road. It is not meant for heavy traffic. But thanks to a severe long-term closure of nearby Glenwood and repeating issues on the primary commute corridor – State Route 17 – Waze has been routing traffic along Mountain Charlie.

While I haven’t seen specific news, I’m sure this has alarmed everyone. Mountain Charlie can’t handle large trucks or any kind of volume, but Waze doesn’t track or adjust for road capacity or vehicle size. Local residents are surely furious, as well as concerned about the road’s ability to hold up under heavy use. The re-routed drivers are aghast when they find themselves stuck in a long line of idling vehicles on a narrow mountain road with no way to turn around. Some are literally frightened (I’ve seen a UR) because they’re unused to driving with a cliff a few feet away and no guard rail.

It wasn’t a serious problem until Glenwood closed, but now that it is a problem, I’m not aware of any solution that meets with current best practices. We could change the type to Private Road, but it’s a public road and best practices say not to do that. We can implement a closure, but it’s not closed. I don’t know what to do about it.

Hope this helps!

P.S. “Mountain Charlie” was a local stagecoach driver who was discovered after many years on the job to be a woman.

3

One additional angle – we have also received reports saying that “closure tracking is inadequate” from people who, after discussion, clarified that what they really wanted to do was monitor bottlenecks and/or road status. In other words, they didn’t exactly want more closures marked, rather they didn’t understand the difference between Waze’s hard closures and the soft closures on the local roads.

Let me explain. After the storms many roads were still passable, and officially open, but narrowed to one lane, or inappropriate for non-local traffic due to roadworks or potential instability. What these users wanted was a way for the local community to keep track of and discuss these issues in a way that wouldn’t disappear quickly like other road-condition reports. They had noticed that Waze supports this for hard closures and wanted something like it for soft closures.

And indeed, as an editor placing long-term closures, I have found the comments users voluntarily submit on closure status super helpful in understanding the severity of the damage. Surely other local Wazers benefit as well. Unfortunately, we editors can only support this kind of usage by placing hard closures. If a hard closure is inappropriate, we can’t place it, and the community can’t use it as a kernel for long-term road-status discussion.

4

Finally, I just looked again at the Santa Cruz County road-status website, and although it says it was recently updated, it’s woefully out of date. It still lists many trees down, but the down trees are relatively easy to clear and I’m sure most if not all of them are gone. One road on the list I drive every day and I know for a fact it’s been clear for 5 days.

5

DwarfLord,
Using all available resources, are you able to confirm that all active road closures are on the map?
That is the main concern.

Thanks for your help.

6

Nivekeel, no, I am not. I do not trust the county website very much at all as it appears to be increasingly out of date despite the recent “last updated” field. As the storm gets further in the past, the news media no longer cover the closures. I’m not aware of other status resources, other than hoping for specific reports from locals, or spending a day doing personal reconnaissance.

MapSir said the concern focused on Mountain Charlie Road. I believe it is a public road that is open, although I haven’t driven it lately.

My extensive discussion was an attempt to help folks understand what is going on and why Waze might be receiving complaints, in particular that the complaints should not be taken willy-nilly at face value “roads are closed that should be marked as closed”. I would like to think the information was helpful. If not, I hope someone will let me know.

7

I agree with Dwarflord. I’m on the other side of the Bay, where the damage is much less than in the Santa Cruz mountains. I monitor Twitter, the county/city/town websites, Nextdoor, Nixxle (sp?), etc. In many cases, they provide notification when roads are closed due to flooding or mudslide, but nothing about when they will reopen. Some of these roads don’t even get a notification sent out that they are open, so it’s been a guessing game the last few weeks. On top of that, we really do not have enough Map Editors to sufficiently cover northern CA.

8

Here’s a perfect example of community regret about Waze’s shortcomings in an emergency/disaster situation. SR-152 has been closed for over two weeks. I just checked my closure and found this very informative note about the status of the road.

Unfortunately, now that the road has only a bottleneck as opposed to a hard closure, I need to remove the real-time closure, and this informative community note will go away. Some of the complaints I’ve seen from the Santa Cruz Mountains about Waze showing inaccurate road status referred to the lack of exactly this sort of usage. It feels such a shame to delete it.

Screen Shot 2017-02-28 at 8.00.29 AM.png

9

Thank you for the detailed explanation, this clears many things up.
It sounds like a complicated situation to manage, with all the ongoing closures and openings.

I trust you guys to know better than the authority websites, so please let me know if our closures team can help in any way.

Thanks again for looking into this, greatly appreciated!!

10

It sounds like we almost need a map chat that is semi-permanent that we can review in the editor. Or, maybe we need the ability to post ‘traffic hazards’ in the editor with expirations, similar to closures? Sorry for the somewhat rambling off topic post.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

11

The best (and I suspect only) way to improve Waze’s ability to help with disaster situations like this is to improve the crowdsourcing capability from the app.

As we know, the real-time closure system has serious problems. One (last I knew) is that one cannot close a road segment if one has already even partially traveled it – for example, as far as the 6-foot-diameter downed redwood before having to turn around! Another is the difficulty of pressing the desired “close” arrow, especially when the angles at the junction are too tight. And then there is Waze’s inability to cache closure requests (or comments on existing closures) in the absence of cell signal until one reaches connectivity.

These severe shortcomings deprive the huge Wazer community of being able to help anywhere near as much as they could. As a result, it puts more pressure on editors who are usually not there in person and have to interpolate between spotty and often inaccurate reports available on the web.

Until Waze improves its crowdsourced closure system, I fear there’s little more we editors can do in emergencies like this.

12

Thank you for the feedback Sir.
There are grand plans to improve the RTC system, and the Crisis response, but it will take some time to develop.

We really appreciate the help that editors are able to provide in these situations, not taken for granted. And we are aware of the complexity with the limited tools currently provided.
Any feedback is always welcome and helpful.

Thanks!!