What is brought up is a good point and one I think we should carefully consider.
There can be all sorts of “unpaved” roadways from city streets, primary streets and highways. “Unpaved” is more of a surface treatment. Whereas “4x4/Offroad” is more of a type of roadway. I think the suggestion has a lot of merit. The problem is, is that it will likely take Waze more time to implement a new checkbox and possibly add app/routing features to allow us to route around such areas.
I would point out that the client does a have a dirt road road setting. I had been assuming that this setting would still apply to the renamed “unpaved” road type and would be changed to be the unpaved roads settings. If “unpaved” become a checkbox property, I would still think that setting should apply so that user can decide whether they want to be routed over unpaved roads.
We would then need an additional setting as to whether the user wants to include “4x4/Offroad” roads if these are ever to be included in routes.
The other issue that comes to mind is that I have seen in reference to unpaved roads are roads that are only open seasonally. Is this something that should be addressed within the options for these road types, addressed with time based restrictions, or addressed manually as the roads open and close.
It was strongly implied at the meetup that a best solution for this is to use time based turn restrictions (when implemented) to a seasonal segment, along lines of:
00:00-23:59 from November 1 to March 31 each year.
I think it’d actually be pretty easy to implement. They already did this with toll roads. All they’d do is more or less copy the code that said ‘avoid segments with flag TOLL’, and replace it with 'avoid segments with flag ‘UNPAVED’, or whatever. There’s no reinventing the wheel here.
That said, I’ve done a lot of thinking about this subject recently, and I think I am now putting in my opinion as ‘I think this should be a checkbox, not a road type’. On the top end (where we have the option to avoid freeways), I think editors are in pretty clear agreement as to what a freeway and major highway is, and on the other side, a client user ALSO understands what it means to say ‘Avoid major highways’.
On the low end, however, we have ‘dirt/4x4/unpaved/whatever we ultimately call it’, ‘street’, and ‘primary street’. Waze’s own Wiki description admits that a primary street to give one example can be ‘a dirt road through a town’, and in Western states, there ARE good examples of roads that will cut off hundreds of miles and may even be faster - but is not ideal for someone who doesn’t carry their own gasoline or wants something to eat along the way.
The US is a huge country; it’s possible to find dirt roads that are long enough that if Waze routed a user onto it, they’d not be able to get gas from ‘full tank to empty’. However, they ALSO are ‘that one way to that little town somewhere’.
I’d like to suggest the term ‘Avoid primitive roads’ for a checkbox. or similar verbiage, and that this box be checked by default on install (or in a user’s saved settings in the cloud). Primitive CAN mean ‘unpaved’ OR ‘4x4’ (which is the typical thing people will think of when they see ‘primitive road’, and it keeps it simple. They get three choices: ‘Toll’, ‘Major highways’, and ‘Primitive roads’.
This way, we can in fact have primary roads or even minor arterials that are dirt, one lane, whatever…BUT…this means that a Waze user understands that if they uncheck the box, they may be on roads that…well…can get ugly.
I don’t think the code should be country specific, so whatever is done I would expect to be done worldwide.
I think primitive roads and unpaved can be two different concepts. In other words, there can be major roads that are unpaved. There are people that want to avoid perfectly passable dirt/gravel roads. Those are the people who we are catering to with an unpaved checkbox.
What seem to me to be a rather different problem is that waze has indicated that ultimately the plan is to have all roads mapped even they are not typically passable for the normal passenger car. Those it would seem to me should be designated with a separate road type. When waze implements vehicle types then there should be a 4x4 option for vehicle type that would need to be selected to route over primitive roads. Otherwise they shouldn’t be used in routing. I’m not sure if this would work given the current scheme, because it seems to me that this should not be a case of don’t use the road if there another alternative. Rather, unless you have positively indicated that you want 4x4 roads they should never be used in routing. But we know waze has a difficult time with never.
As an aside I’m surprised by the following statement:
I pretty much think that major highway is the road type with the least agreement among users and editors.
Admittedly, I do much of my editing out in California and Washington, where a major arterial road in funtional classification is usually a ‘Very long range point to point road that is not a freeway’, and there hasn’t been much disagreement there, particularly as they tend to be fewer and further between. Out east I could imagine this could get a lot more contentious, especially where several roads are nearby one another with similar characteristics. ‘Which is the major one?’ and so forth.
I have read posts in the New Zealand forums where minor/major highways are unpaved / dirt /gravel and I think that is why the check box was brought up as a way to indicate it being a dirt road vs being a drop down road type. 4x4 roads were decided to be a road drop down type since most people who choose to drive those kind of roads has the vehicle to be able to drive them. I think “primitave” roads would fall under the 4x4 road type. Isn’t this what was agreed on in the meetup and wasn’t that the plan of action by Waze or was this when the discussion started to de-evolve?
Since when are any such signs required? In Utah and indeed most of the southwest, you leave the hardball at your own risk.
There are many high quality dirt roads that are kept graded and depending on the snow levels open year round (this is NOT just a seasonal issue). And then there are roads that get a once over once a year, there are roads that get graded once every five years, and there are roads that are only kept open by the 4x4 trucks that cruise them hunting (many of which the feds and enviro’s want to close and eliminate), or the roads that are in the base maps but are really 1800’s era government mule trails that can be hard to follow on foot. I’ve deleted “roads” that I grew up hunting on until the feds cross hatched them to close them (plowed trenches across the road every couple hundred feet doing far more damage to the terrain than the road ever did.) I knew those were no longer viable but can we count on editors doing so, or is someone going to be led up a closed road (cross-hatched or not) only to find a forest service agent at the other end with a ticket book ready?
Not that all opinions are not valid but this discussion should be most led by those who operate in areas with such primitive roads. As I’ve said in multiple threads on this topic, people have died because they followed their GPS on a dirt route that petered out to nothing and by the time they realized they were in trouble, they didn’t have the skills to turn around (a 20 pt turn may be required) and get back out and they were so far in they didn’t have the gas even if they could manage to turn around.
I am a big fan of the checkbox option. We should then discuss the exact criteria for what gets marked as an unpaved street and what gets left as a 4X4 trail. I say if there is not an outlet and no residential structures on the road leave it a 4X4 (once we get the checkbox). If the editor can feel fairly certain the road is at least periodically maintained and there is an outlet back onto a hardball road then it gets the street category.
This checkbox for unpaved and a determination of what will qualify as which road type is a good idea, it does allow us to more safely edit into the backcountry but we still need to be very careful about which roads/trails actually get paved. Despite Ehud’s stated desire, every trace paved is NOT a good idea.
Not really, in my opinion. Not until we can tell the app exactly the capabilities of our vehicle, and select not just between dirt (yes/no) but 4x4 or worse (yes/no) as well.
Frankly, to me, anything unpaved is a “dirt road/4x4 trail” and should be marked as that type in order to make the “avoid dirt roads” switch in the client work as accurately as possible until a better classification system is developed, if that even happens.
If you’re familiar with dirt roads along your commute and want to include them, simply turn dirt roads on in your client. But to try and classify different kinds of unpaved roads, as much as I like the idea, may be beyond the scope of Waze’s intended purpose.
That’s all fine and dandy with the way the road structures work in United States. However, this issue mainly comes up in other countries where the infrastructure is different from what we’re used to.
My main point was that you claimed “out here in the west it’s required” and I countered to make the point that while some states may so require such a sign most of them don’t
True: by now all the cow-paths have been paved. But we do have a functional equivalent: roads that have so many potholes and so much broken pavement that they have reverted to Thomas Hobbes’ “State of Nature”.
Really? I guess the entire East Coast from Miami to Portland is a sea of concrete and asphalt then. I grew up in Ohio, and since that time have lived in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, California and Texas, and every single one of these states has state, county, and/or township maintained roads that are graveled or chipped and sealed. They are major roads, and a lot of times the only way in or out. They’re not “dirt”, and don’t require 4x4, they’re just really dusty and play havoc with your paint. Here’s one example near where I grew up - it’s a ~4 mile shortcut that has quite a few houses and more roads off of it, but it’s still a gravel road.
-side note, that are of Ohio needs a lot of work…maybe I should amend my AM application to
include that area, too
It’s still either a street or dirt road depending on if you think someone who wants to avoid dirt roads would mind going down that road or not, and the higher road types (ps, mH, MH, and Fwy) are still irrelevant here.
True there are states that number all their roads, including many unpaved ones. That doesn’t necessarily make all of them highways, though. I would think that any unpaved road, by definition, cannot be a highway.
The current routing might discard normal street /primary street types if it is over a specific distance. If it is the only route that joins up small towns or even provinces / states or a neighbouring country and the shortest alternative is more than 3 times the length and travel duration, I’d prefer to do a 100km + stretch of well maintained gravel vs 300 or 400 km + of paved.
There are many places worldwide where these roads actually factor to the equivalent of Minor Highways as they are the ONLY way to get to the destination. They even carry the same National Route designation as their paved counterparts, since there are no alternatives.
There is no reason why this can not be accommodated the same way as tolls.
Indicate the route contains unpaved & let the Wazer choose to use it or not.
That is preferable to the Wazer having to resort to another Nav app to get him to the destination just because standard Waze options might not find a route to the destination.
I personally have no idea what the limit is for the current nondescript setting of ‘Avoid long ones’ is for dirt roads. Is it 5km, 20? or 100?
If there is no alternative, what is the routing cut-off before the engine gives up?
