"Slip Roads" in Singapore

Map Editors Community Singapore
1

At many traffic junctions in Singapore, to allow a more constant flow of traffic, slip roads are there to allow cars to continue to make a left turn without having to stop for traffic lights.

In many countries, these “slip roads” don’t naturally exist as they allow left turn on red automatically (right turn if you’re in Europe/US left-hand drive, right side of the road), and cars just turn as long as there’s no traffic coming at them.

Of course in Singapore, things are different, but that does not mean we should use the wrong term for such roads. At the simplest forms these are streets. not service roads.

By definition, in Waze (and in many parts of the world), Service Roads are supposed to be used for streets typically adjacent to a highway, known as lay-bys for most other countries. The few locations this might exist are probably the service roads along ECP.

Anyway, we should all be using the Type: Streets as that’s what these roads are.

They could even be part of a sequence of Primary Roads, and calling them that would be fine too (if both ends are linked to Primary Roads)

But as to the Name of the road, many have left them unnamed, which leads to “unnamed roads”… And I’ve come to realise that as part of future GPS turn-by-turn routing, we might end up with Turn left to Unnamed Road…

So it dawned on me that we should simply name the road with the name of the street/road that it leads to…

…and in the event that a slip road does lead to more than one road, simply choose the “major”/“longer” of the roads that the slip road might lead to…

Thoughts, anyone?

2

If a road is unnamed, the directions given to the driver use the name of the named road it leads to. It’s common to leave a “slip road” unnamed. Here is an example from my part of the world: http://tinyurl.com/8epa372 .

3

Hi ncc1701v,

I completely understand how difficult it actually is to find a slip road in most parts of the world… I love the fact that you would have to drive over 200 miles from New York City to find that example you showed outside of Ithaca…

In fact, throughout my travels in Asia, Europe, Australia and America, I hardly recall anything like the numerous (and often sudden) slip roads that we get in Singapore.
You could drive for hours and never have gone through that sort of road… but in Singapore, any journey that takes longer than 5 minutes would usually encounter at least 2-3 such roads…And even on my basic commute to and fro, I would have had gone through at least 10 per day…

In 90% of the Urbanised areas in Singapore, the road density is similar to Manhattan (http://tinyurl.com/wazesg20121005), with over 2000 miles of roads in less than 400 km2 of urban space (the rest is made up of reservoirs, parks and “reserved” forest/military areas)… yet despite having such similarity, you would be hard pressed to find a single slip road throughout the greater Manhattan area; they just don’t exist…

As of today, there are over 1000 (mostly unnamed) slip roads in Waze - Singapore, and the vast majority have been initially referred to as Service Rds by unsuspecting editors (who probably have never used an actual Freeway/Highway Service Rd since Waze’s inception) .

And within a typical city block, in most of Singapore’s residential estates (where 80% of the population stay), you will encounter slip roads at every corner (here’s an example of one such area: http://tinyurl.com/wazesg20121005a).

But as for now, I’ll settle for having it unnamed rather than what some people have used which is To “add road name here”, so the slip road from (a non-existent) John Street to Adam Road might be called “To: Adam Road”, where simply “Adam Rd” would suffice.

4

I stand corrected.

I was wrong; And I was right

  1. No I was wrong, you can find slip roads in Manhattan (http://tinyurl.com/wazesg20121005b)

  2. Yes I was right, you name it based on the street that it leads to.
    And of course you for the Singapore editors noting the Highway exit nomenclature, if we’re coming OFF from a freeway/highway (or expressway here in Singapore), we use the Exit No. followed by Street Name), not simply putting “Exit PIE” or “Exit to TPE”.

Here’s another example just a short ways north of my first example (http://tinyurl.com/wazesg20121005c)

And here’s another that’s on the other side of Manhattan (http://tinyurl.com/wazesg20121005d)

And after all that virtual travelling, I am so envious of our American counterparts.
Not only do they have such clear bing satellite imagery, far less foilage to block their view of the roads, but basically the simplicity of their right-angled roads makes it a cinch to make proper maps.

I bet they don’t get the frequency of road works or changes in road direction/diversions/detours that we keep getting due to our crazy population expansion (roads, cars and people all included)

cheers to all my SG Wazers and fellow editors!
And I do hope you can see what I am driving at :slight_smile:

5

I general, I understand its not recommended to create the slip roads, unless taking the slipway causes map errors due to it’s distance from the 2 connected roads.
The other reason is typically if you want to force a ‘keep left’ or ‘keep right’ TTS instruction instead of a ‘turn left’ or ‘turn right’.

Slipways or AT grade connectors and the road types that should be used used are discussed here in the Wiki : http://world.waze.com/wiki/index.php/At-Grade_Connectors

6

Digitium, here’s what we use: http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/At-Grade_Connectors#How_to_name_the_connector

Regards …

7

I started this thread mostly because the map update request I see all too frequently are at junctions like this, and the complaint is: Turn not allowed.

Yes, we definitely want a keep left warning.

In many parts of Singapore, a lane (on a multilane road) could lead into a slip road without any warning, and the opposite is even worse…If the driver was initially on the centre lane, as they approach the main junction (having failed to keep left earlier), turning left is illegal even if they are in the left most lane at that point.

Here’s the view some 300ft from a junction just a stone’s throw from my own home

Note that the road actually came from a 3-lane road all the way back; and routinely along the road, the left most lane leads directly to a slip road, and the right most lane is a turn-right only lane.

Just this morning, on my journey along this very road, I was using Waze and had to turn left. but there was no indication to keep left, just that we were turning left in 200m. As usual, there was a queue of cars already waiting to turn, and had I not already kept left (having known the route), I would not be able to keep left at a later point (and on most nights and mornings, there’s traffic jams throughout our densely populated island, even in these suburban housing estates.)

Worse still, I don’t know if this discussion is causing people to choose to do something about the slip roads, but I have started to notice slip roads being erased all over Singapore, and that is now a concern.

I also use other GPS solutions, and some show the physical lanes at junctions, and directs drivers to the respective lanes depending on where their route takes them…

…and as the Country Manager (for Malaysia and Singapore) noted, most drivers here use in-car navigation and not their smart phones, with more issues like this causing routing issues; Once people start complaining about how their routing is messed up I fear the drop off rate will increase…

Here’s an interesting fact:
Almost 1 million vehicles (700,000 are cars) in a country of less than 270 square miles, Singapore is a country like no other (short of Monaco, which is far smaller principality).

8

I had a look at your example and if this is a standard problem, you might want to move the slip road start even further away from the actual crossing to enable a warning to ‘keep left’ far earlier, similar to ramps on highways.
It’s also a pity that WME junctions do not have a ‘last updated by’ attribute that could indicate who last modified turn restrictions or removed something else that was attached to it, like your slipways that get deleted.

One of the big problems is that turn indication arrows on roadways only start very near these intersections, giving drivers without GPS no warning in advance. Compare where the right turn arrows start compared to the straight or left turn only for example.
Add some buses or trucks to the equation and your visible cues in a normal vehicle are limited even further.

9

Thank you “coolcat” for understanding my predicament…

Anyway, as for the issue of deleted slip roads, we probably have to start locking them after creating them :slight_smile: