To second a question posted today by AggieRG in the editor;
No more alleys in Vancouver?
Every alley west of Boundary has disappeared.
Alleys in other areas of Metro are intact.
No more alleys in BC. Just haven’t had time to head to the 'burbs with my delete key yet.
Feel free to work on that, just please make sure you delete any extra junction nodes, too.
One exception: if the front street can’t be stopped on (eg to deliver a pizza), the alley can stay.
Are the junction nodes intentionally being left behind or should we be removing these?
Noticed that a map comment was created on the subject and I have directed those editors here.
Wazeopedia explains the reasoning for when alleys should be mapped. https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/Canada/index.php?title=Main_Page#Alleys_and_Laneways
Alleys are currently not mapped outside of the Vancouver area and have not been on the map for some time.
I’m sure someone else may explain this much for succinctly but I believe alleys are being phased out due to address locations being provided from 3rd party location sources. Often these locations are not located at the front of an address. In these cases the location may snap to the alley as the closest segment and thus users are directed to the alleyway instead of the front of the address. Mapping every individual address and business is not feasible for us to overcome this issue. Users who generally access addresses from alleyways are generally residents from that address and don’t need to be told to make a turn into the alley just prior to arriving at their home.
Junction nodes should be deleted as well.
Considering how much driving down alleys happen in Vancouver, which are lit with street lights, this policy needs to be considered again, as it seriously deminishes the usability of Waze as a product.
Come to Vancouver and see how it’s different. There are Lanehouses with numbers on them, parallel street parking down alleys is codified, and in general, turns on and off named streets are made to and from alleys as if just another road. It’s like driving around with half a map. Please see Google Maps continued use of these “streets”.
Sorry - the fact of the matter is that alleys have existed in Vancouver’s map for far too long.
When I look at a sampling of them in Streetview, Vancouver’s alleys are no different than the ones in the older areas of Edmonton, Saskatoon, or Calgary.
In all, they present a problem for consistently proper navigation and also contribute to visual map clutter.
So based on your non-presence in the region and what you see on streetview you (or is this some higher level decision that we can request a formal review?) unilaterally decide that a very functional part of Vancouver driving should be removed from one of the best GPS apps out there? This takes the advantage out of Waze and destroys it. We need all our roadways to be mapped, there are so many places here aroubd the Lower Mainland that other apps just can’t get you there where I’m able to demonstrate Waze able to complete the task, thus getting people to try Waze. This is a matter of deterioration of a good product. Or we should have local area managers that actually live in the areas they oversee.
AggieRG: this was discussed among the Canadian Champs.
We have LONG held that alleys should not be mapped and had excluded Toronto and Vancouver regions from this. The Toronto champs wanted to retain them, however those of us in Western Canada wanted to streamline this as some editors were wanting to add new ones.
This was not a unilateral decision, and it was made with full agreement with the Local Champ that is in the Vancouver area and simply brings the region into the national mapping standards we’ve held for several years.
Mapping alleys create more problems than they solve, in part due to Waze’s limitations.
Finally, please check your attitude. We’re all volunteers, and the higher level editors (myself included) have a great deal more experience dealing with the details and intricacies. There’s more going on here than you realize.
Oh, that makes me sad, sorry that I may have upset you, I’m just dealing with the loss of one of the features I thought made Waze so great. But you’re correct, I don’t know the intricacies of the Waze code and routing algorithms, so I’ll leave it up to all of you. Would love to see the developers work on this and perhaps make it possible to reinstate the full street map of Vancouver.
We haven’t said a complete “no” to all alleys.
The point is - if the alley does not represent the primary public access to the residences situated on it, then there’s no reason to map it, as the risk of a public person (e.g. pizza delivery guy) being directed to the back door outweighs any possible benefit. This would describe over 99% of the alleys in any given city.
There is functionality that sort-of works (meaning, sometimes it seems to be active, and sometimes it does not) that would allow us to have alleys mapped - at least as far as the routing concerns go. However, this requires every residence having a “residential point place” (RPP) created and placed correctly at the street side of the property. We simply don’t have the manpower to do that, particularly when the feature seems to not be fully reliable.
If there is a particular alley or laneway you’d like to see mapped, feel free to ask - this approach isn’t meant to damage the map, but to improve it. In some cases, there are alleys that would improve the map (understanding that if it’s more about a private driveway than a public access, that’s not within the scope).