Thanks for your post Tamar, and once again, welcome!
Welcome to Australia
Below is a bit of a mind dump of things on our mind. But first, you really need to understand the size of Australia to understand some of the issues we have.
Despite our size… “Only 2% of Australia’s population lives in the yellow area”:
Source: buzzfeed.com
You can’t even zoom out all the way in the Waze maps to view more than 120 km. Many States are more than 1000 km across.
Roads in Australia
Our massive size and population dispersal mean our road networks are like nothing else in the world and presents a unique challenge to map and route in Waze. Despite being the size of North America, we don’t have a neat grid of dual-carriage way motorways/major highways overlayed like a net over the country. Nor do we have the number of editors that the USA has. The centre of the country is desert, and the major highways running through it might only be considered a primary street in other countries.
Next we need to look at some Waze mechanics like the excessive pruning on long routes. Waze prefers to route users along major highways for long distances for obvious reasons, but we don’t have the above mentioned “web” of major highways over the country, and so, we’ve had to artificially upgrade many roads from streets to primary roads, and primary roads to major highways, simply so people can get a route from A to B using Waze. We’ve been discouraged in the past from doing this as “it’s a workaround, and workarounds should be approved by HQ before being used”. We’re aware of an alternative using alternative names for streets for “name continuity”, but this also looks like a workaround. Do you have any advice on how we should deal with this?
You may be aware that until Waze has enough data on traffic, new roads have a default speed/travel time applied to them which isn’t particularly reflective of real-world times. In remote areas, there may not be mobile phone coverage, so Waze never gets better estimates. For example, this section of road, and several others nearby, has a speed limit of 100 km/h and can comfortable be driven at that speed, yet Waze thinks a typical speed there is 65 km/h. In some cases, this causes Waze to route drivers along longer and slower dirt roads, which happen to have better mobile coverage. Ideally, we’d like a way for senior editors to set a default estimated speed, or maybe Waze could make the original speed estimate some large fraction of the speed limit?
Mapping Quality in Australia
Take a look at the 2% image above again - Most of the densely populated areas of Australia are reasonably well mapped. The land where the 2% of the population lives, larger than most countries, isn’t up to standard. Consider the average editor can only edit 1-2km from where they’ve driven; we have little hope of completing the mapping of Australia right now.
The general problem with mapping in Australia has even made the news. This article talks about how Google Map travel times to some remote towns affects their tourism and businesses. Waze doesn’t get a mention, but we are unlikely to have the majority of routes mapped to any standard comparable to Google.
Goals and Current Issues
With the above in mind, below are some things we are looking at to resolve.
Goals as I see them:
- Getting new editors interesting in mapping and retaining them. To do this, we’ve tried our hardest to build a community that is interactive and welcoming. Most of the conversations take place on Discord, as Vestigal mentioned prior.
- We want to map Australia in Waze - I believe mapping of even remote parts of Australia will encourage more people to use the Waze app where they currently cannot because there is limited maps. More Wazers may lead to more editors.
These are some additional complex issues we need help with:
- External Data Sources
- We’re aiming for high quality mapping in high density areas. Outside these however, we rarely have editors with local knowledge or access to street view. Street view is generally from 2008 and street signs are pixelated/unreadable.
- Therefore, we are seeking permission to use more external data sources. Recently, we had a major win on received permission to use some federal government data in Waze.
- Most data sources in Australia offer data freely for use under the Creative Commons licenses, most of which require attribution (aka Waze to acknowledge them). All it required Waze to do was add the data source and acknowledge them as ituajr explained in his post here from Dana. This means we can now use suburb boundary data in Waze maps.
- But this isn’t enough. Each state/territory has it’s own mapping data, which would need to be attributed too before we could use it. If we could get extra data sources attributed, we could potentially stop relying on local editor knowledge and pixelated street view signs and instead map from official and reliable sources.
- Data and information
- Information is also power - we need to know where to focus our efforts. We need access to data we don’t currently have to determine where should we spend our efforts editing.
- Data for example: Where are Waze users most active in Australia? 2) Which state needs the most work? Where are most of our URs coming from? Where are the most hazard reports? Info like this will help us determine where our user base is. Even if the raw data is only accessible to country management, at least that’s something. Do you know of any existing dashboards or data sources we / our coordinator Ituajr can access?
- Sprinkles on Top
- Australia is the size of the USA, but we don’t have states implemented in Waze yet.
- We have some issues with our street abbreviation convention causing lookup issues in Google Maps which are just too complex to explain here.
The solution to nearly all these complex problems is outside our grasp, and we need significant help from Waze to help overcome them - we need help unlike any other country currently has.
We would really benefit from regular participation of Waze staff in our community - both yourself and Dana are very welcome - to overcome these unique problems and keep morale of the community up. Is easy to feel like we’ve been forgotten sometimes, despite the cogs turning in the background, the community would really benefit from regular, deep and meaningful engagement.
Gasp! Deep breath! I know that’s a long post, apologies. I hope this helps share some insight into what is on our plate and how you and Dana might be able to help us. 