I’m afraid I must beg to differ. The intentions are good but I don’t think they’ll work out.
My office building includes an EMS/Paramedic station. The paramedics are almost never there. They seem to live primarily out of their ambulance vans. Even on those rare occasions they are located at the building, sometimes they stay with the vehicle and don’t come inside except to use the restrooms.
If we marked the building with a nice red area place to alert drivers to the presence of emergency services it would harm drivers. It would distract them from other destinations that are more likely to be staffed, and thus waste critical time.
In most cases emergency fire personnel are required to staff their station full time. EMS personnel are not, and do not. We need to preserve a category name for fire station that implies full-time staffing and does not broaden scope beyond that, so that we can keep marking such locations with red area places.
Makes sense, however, then the point of giving firehouses red area places goes away.
I have no problem with marking an EMS office as a destination Place Point (who knows, maybe the ambulance drivers use Waze?) and giving it a new category of “Fire Station / EMS” or some such. My concern is only that Wazers do not see a red destination on their display if it is unlikely to have personnel who can help in an emergency at any time of day. This was I believe the main thrust of the “Hospital / Medical Care” vs. “Offices” discussion.
It would be fine with me to change the guidance so that fire stations do not get area places. Or at least that part-time fire stations do not get area places, but that places an additional discovery burden on editors.
(As an aside, I’ll confess I didn’t know that fire houses are not staffed full-time. Fires don’t happen just during normal business hours…maybe the old-fashioned approach has been replaced by an on-call system? I don’t really know anything about it.)
The valley that I grew up, the Fire Stations are all manned by volunteers and a lot of the places around the country are like that, I have only seen the major city and urban areas have full time people man the fire stations.
Even if a firehouse is unmanned, they frequently have something publicly accessible like an extinguisher or alarm if someone is in need. Dunno about EMS-only locations. I think we should change the guidelines if having personnel available is in the display criteria.
Here in PA 90% of firefighters are on-call volunteers.
That being said, I still think we should include EMS in the name and restrict it to normally manned stations.
Can you clarify what you mean by “restrict it” (i.e. restrict use of the category, or restrict use of the Area Place?) and by “normally manned” (i.e., 24/7, normal business hours, minimum 10 hours/week, etc.?). The devil may be in the details.
I don’t think you are understanding where this message is shown. If you select segments which are in different cities and states, there is a string which is explicitly put on the screen for different streets, and different cities and different states and different countries. When you do this, you get this in the UI.
So, if we add your suggestion, it would say: Multiple streets selected with differing names or cities, Multiple streets selected with differing names or cities, Multiple streets selected with differing names or cities which I think is unnecessarily long and looks like a bug.
We do not have the ability to modify the functionality of the UI, as I think you want, to put a different kind of message if there are just different street names, a different message for different states, a different message for different street and different state, etc, etc. There are four distinct strings and they all could appear on screen at once.
I understand that is not as simple as posting a request and having a Level Six editor wave a digital wand. But I am passionate about this distinction, it should have been made as soon as GPS Navigation killed foolish people. I am a pretty natural navigator, and even I have nearly gotten myself in a tight spot a time or two by falling in the complacency trap of “Well, the GPS says to go this way.” People have died as a result of this, and being in a mapping profession, I know very well that even intelligent normally careful people will make large errors because of our innate instinct to believe it just because our map says so.
Instead of Fire Station/EMS, how about Fire Station/Ambulance?
Using “Ambulance” instead of “EMS” helps in two ways.
First, “Ambulance” isn’t an acronym and so is a more approachable term. If we used EMS it would be the only other acronym in the list besides ATM. Of course it is possible that a driver will search for EMS and not ambulance, but honestly I can’t believe a driver in an urgent situation is going to search for either one. The whole idea of ambulances is that they come to you.
Second, “Ambulance” makes it abundantly clear that the category should mark the location of the vehicle, not an EMS office where the EMTs watch TV and sleep between calls. All the life-saving gear is in the vehicle, not in the office; even if you did drive to an EMS office and there was someone there, he would take you to the vehicle. I think editors will intuitively understand that a location where the vehicle simply “perches” for a few minutes or a few hours here or there should not be marked as “Fire Station/Ambulance”; using the more intuitive term means we don’t have to worry so much about modifying the Places guidance.
It seems to me that “Fire Station/Ambulance” still satisfies the original desire, to expand “Fire Station” into a more general sense of “first responder”.
A subset of the Places that would qualify for EMS!
According to the Wikipedia article on Emergency Medical Services, the term EMS by definition means mobile care; first responders who take portable equipment to the site of the health emergency and then transport the ill and injured to hospitals.
So it surprised me that there is support in the community for mapping EMS as static Places when they are by definition mobile. But in the face of strong resistance I am giving up arguing against this. Instead I was offering a more intuitive and accurate name for just what it is we are mapping.
I guarantee you that every EMS location is going to have a parking spot for an ambulance. Mapping “EMS” effectively means mapping those parking spots whether there’s an ambulance there or not.
If we map “Ambulance” it intuitively means a place where ambulances spend the majority of their time. That will be a small subset of what we’d get if we map “EMS”.
Alternately, we can revisit whether it makes sense to map mobile facilities.
My concern was having random street corners gettingnmap because a wazers drove by and saw an ambulance parked there on standby, or they know an ambulance usually parks there between calls.
That’s a valid concern. Hopefully the presence of “Ambulance” as part of the compound category “Fire Station/Ambulance” would mitigate that, at least for conscientious contributors.
To the extent that it doesn’t mitigate that, the problem could be even more acute with “Fire Station/EMS” because an EMS office can be correct even if an ambulance is almost never located there. But, when the ambulance isn’t located there, there’s unlikely to be personnel or equipment at the EMS office to make it worth mapping or routing to. It’s just an empty office with a water cooler, a TV, and a sofa chair or two.
The argument can go both ways. In NYC FDNY*EMS are staffed 24/7 at a minimum by a supervisor who is a certified EMT or Paramedic, and they always have equipment there even if there are no ambulances present. Now I know this doesn’t extrapolate everywhere, just a different perspective. We might never be able to achieve optimal results relying on just the name. Guidance in the wiki will be important too.
In the NYC case, as they are a division of the fire department, they could fall back to that category regardless. But the idea is to allow it when appropriate, and not encourage it when inappropriate.
Sidebar would there be any concern to mapping an EMS station which is only staffed on down time as a point? Are we only concerned about category abuse as an area? If so let’s keep in mind that users adding places from the app, (those least likely to read the wiki ) can only add points, not areas.
