Stray(ed) roads (and the problems with them)

Map Editors Community Malaysia
1

I’ve got a PM on the problem of strayed roads that you’ve see when you first start to edit, especially the areas where a lot of Wazers were driving but nobody built the streets so far!

The strayed roads is annoying to say the least and they’re making editing a more difficult job (because they’re sometimes connected to real roads, thus splitting them unnecessary into segments where not necessary.

It clutters you’re picture, thus it’s difficult to built the street after the aerial picture, identifying which are strayed and which aren’t.

So why they’re are there in the first place (and even keep popping up constantly in already built streets and highways)?

My theory:
1) Not all GPS on smartphones work the same quality

I’ve seen especially the Blackberries (which are very popular here in Malaysia) to have worse quality than eg an Android phone. It can also be the programming of Waze, as the Blackberry version of Waze has the least features, the most being on an iPhone (which I don’t have, so could never try so far).

2) Not precise street layout of existing streets/highways
I’ve noticed this especially on highways which are built two-way, but are indeed much bigger than that, like typically a highway here in KL has 3 lanes each side (a lot have 2 lanes each side as well like Jalan Kuching eg, but that is a minor highway or premier street like Jalan Ipoh). Thus the exact position on the Waze map isn’t correctly reflected as a second lane is missing, the phone/app jumps out of the picture/lane (you can see this happeing also in cluttered highway crossings) and either follows another lane (maybe a stray one by someone else) or builts even a new one (when you’re in bulldozer mode).
3) Wazers use it on motorbikes and whilst walking?

It can also be that some are using Waze whilst not driving in a car or lorry, means they leave the paved road and walk or use shortcuts with motorbikes/bicycles. Obviously it doesn’t help to use Waze in such a way, as we’re building proper paved streets :wink:

Solution(s):
Well, there’s only one (besides continous work from Waze development team on improving GPS accuracy on all smartphones OS and give same features everywhere). It is to delete the clutter/stray roads when you’re absolutely sure they’re indeed stray roads. Why? Because each road driven has some information in there (average speed and direction eg), that you will delete as well (thus this info needs to be built up new).
You can delete stray roads beside your own driven roads (I think 1 miles next to it or 1.6 Km), but other than that you need to get either up in the career ladder (I think you get more rights on editing with higher ranks - Waze please confirm) or you ask to become an area manager.
How can you become an area manager?

Write a short email to support@waze.com and give them a permalink of the area that you would like to start editing, usually that is around the place where you live or where you’re working. I’ve found the later extremely useful as I’m trying to convince my colleagues at work to try Waze as well (thus recruiting new Wazers), but in order for them to have a positive experience the working place better be mapped good first, so that the turn-by-turn navigation works and the working place is defined as a landmark.

Hope this helps and please share your view as well, I’ll try to get this forum a bit more interactive with a couple of posts in the future.

Cheers,

Andreas

2

So I’m guessing most roads require rebuilding by deleting strays or inaccurate roads and creating new ones which are more accurate? Is there a proper way to map these highways with 2/3 lanes each side?

From what I’ve been seeing, most roads mapped by waze barely show where exactly intersections are and would be a mostly misleading and confusing if it were used to route waze users around. I guess I can start with whatever thats already been mapped and make changes/re-map along the way if thats helps.

wei2009

3

Hi Wei,

deleting stray roads is always a good start if you’re sure they’re indeed stray roads (always check aerial picture or visit real place when in doubt).

Highways shouldn’t be mapped with 2-3 lanes each side, what we do is that we’re building to separate lanes per direction, check out this example: http://world.waze.com/cartouche/?zoom=4&lat=3.1781&lon=101.6774&layers=BTFTFFFFTFFFTFFFFTTTT

So please don’t built 2-3 lanes just to fill up the space that the highway might take. What I do at tol plaze is that I lay down the road in the middle, add a landmark for the tol plaza (there’s even a specific one for Toll Booth) and additionally add a junction, so that if people are waiting in front of payment booth, it doesn’t recognize it as a slow traffic or jam. See example here: http://world.waze.com/cartouche/?zoom=4&lat=3.17582&lon=101.65568&layers=BTFTFFFFTFFFTFFFFTTTT

You’re right in your last point, what I always do is I use the yellow boxes as aiming points as they’re quite good visible. That means the crossings of two streets (both 1 lane wide) is exactly in the middle of the yellow box (at least they have now a purpose to exist, as they’re generally ignored here in MY).

Saw your initial work in Bangsar today, it’s import to always for with “Connectivity highlighted” to see if streets are indeed connected. Remove junctions if they’re useless in the middle of streets as they just make to many small segments of a road. In order to remove them, the street naming must be 100% identical, so it’s necessary to clean up the naming first.

In regards to naming cities, Waze doesn’t recognize areas like Bangsar, Jalan Maarof is in Kuala Lumpur as a city, not in Bangsar (though I recognize the people’s intention to mark areas within the city). So make sure to use the right one, as people will search for them. BTW, saw a lot of street names without a blank between SS and the name, as in SS1. Google Maps and every Garmin has this correctly as “SS 1”, so we should stick to that writing as well. Hmmh, probably time to further write on naming alone :wink:

Cheers,

Andreas

4

Hi Andreas,

I’ve been out of town to attend a meeting and a pitch recently thus my work has been delayed for a while. As for mapping sake, Thanks for pointing the below out.

What I’d like to know is that under the city tab, we enter Kuala Lumpur instead of Bangsar? I’ve also noticed some tabs are labeled as Petaling Jaya for some reason. I’ve labeled some as Bangsar so I’m sorry for the confusion which I’m really glad you cleared that up. I’ll work on correcting those.

I’ve also been facing something weird as I was checking out some areas to clear things up last night. As certain areas have very low mobile reception, 3G drops off and roads run astray or just disconnects, or so it seems. So I guess these areas require manual mapping.

wei2009

5

PJ is a city, as is Shah Alam and Ampang Jaya (which I forget, I’ve typed Ampang only, need to correct myself). We should refer to this list of cities in Malaysia in the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Malaysia_by_population

so that we don’t have a long discussion about wether Kota Damansara (just as an example) is a city or not. I know that still a lot of people would like to enter those into Waze, but following the guidelines it’s not right (until Waze comes out with an extension to name areas, which would be needed much!).

Tell you something about that because I do work in Telecommunication. Switch your mobile to 2G, I do myself. Reason is that even the best provider in Malaysia have coverage problems on 3G, thus you will probably see a lot of times your phones is trying to locate the next 3G base station, causing a lot of searching which is draining the battery (No 1 reason for draining, then comes the screen BTW). I think that this is the reason for the stray roads that we do see, people using 3G and then losing connection whilst getting a weak signal.

It’s even worse with iPhone, as it needs a stronger signal as other phones due to the setup and position of the antenna. Thus on an equal signal (or eg the death grip) it loses already the connection whilst other phones still have a good connection.

Andreas

6

This issues happen here and there…only Area manager can resolve this issues… :smiley:

7

99% right. If the stray road is actually coming from yourself, you can delete it on your own. Otherwise it can be deleted and is pending us area managers confirming it. So keep on cleaning it up and we’ll try to work on the pending asap

Andreas