Sometimes a user types in a well-known location and Waze navigates to an unhelpful point in the vicinity.
I had a steady trickle of UR’s complaining about being navigated onto the restricted road network of Gatwick Airport. Turns out that if you type “Gatwick Airport”, Waze looks up on Google, Bing or similar, and comes up with a destination point in the middle of the South Terminal building. Very sensible, except that you can’t drive to that point. So Waze navigates you to the nearest point on it’s mapped road network, which used to be a very restricted road down on the airport tarmac.
I’ve added a fake new road called “Gatwick Airport South Terminal” https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=row&zoom=6&lat=51.15549&lon=-0.16524 which links the precise point which Waze is trying to get to with the most sensible point I can find on the real road network. I’ve chosen the point at which the roads to the departure drop-off and arrival pick-up points diverge. At this point, the user now gets an instruction for “Gatwick Airport South Terminal”, and the purple line on the phone splits the two practical roads.
To make the new road as unobtrusive as possible on the phone map, I’ve made it a “dirt road/4x4 trail”, which shows up much less that “street” or “private road”. Waze happily directs people along it even with “don’t allow dirt roads” set, since there is no alternative route to what thinks is the right point. The turn onto the fake road does seem to need to be enabled (“green-arrowed”).
The same problem also existed if the user typed “Gatwick Airport North Terminal”, and I’ve applied the same solution.
I think this problem is probably quite widespread, and not just with airports. I tried one of my local nature reserves, and found that Waze directed me up a private residential road which happened to be the closest road it had to the centre of the reserve. Whereas what I wanted was the reserve car park. I’ve now added a dirt road (a real one this time) from the car park towards the centre of the reserve.
This post is to put the idea of adding dirt roads, possibly fake, towards the centre of landmarks out into the wider editing community. It seems to me to be a workable solution. Can anybody see a show-stopper that I’ve missed, or suggest a better alternative?
There’s an odd qwirk with walking trails that might make then more suitable for this this “hack”. Even if a walking trail isn’t connected to the road network, Waze will navigate to the closest road to the end of a trail that is near the destination, assuming the user will walk the rest of the way.
This is probably not recommended (hacks are to be avoided), and may get “fixed” in the future…
I’ve got some thoughts about this but they’ll have to wait until I finish work. :lol:
However, one immediate thought. Your segment will try to route people straight off into the middle of the airport - which they obviously can’t do. If the segment ran between the 2 “real” segments all the way up to the end of the terminal building before heading for the centre, this would give a less obviously fake route on the client. By the time it turns left, drivers will have either gone into the car park or reached the terminal doors. After that, they’re likely to stop navigating.
Nope - Waze doesn’t (yet) navigate to its own addresses, but uses external providers (I.e. Google). Those search results are often to the centers of buildings rather than to navigable points. This is, I think, what walking trails are for.
There is a similar issue at Thorpe Park which crops up from time to time. I’ve had to delete a bit of private road there which was being routed on. Waiting on an update to see how close routing then gets to the centre. Wondering if the London routing issue may sometimes also come into play here, dumping people short on the M3 instead.
Minor problem here is that the search term “Gatwick Airport South Terminal” results in slightly different coordinates that aren’t near your fake segments. I’d be inclined to draw a walking trail along one of the walkways over the railway to intersect both points. Keep it disconnected, with its end node between the two Forecourts. The driver would still need to figure out if they want arrivals or departures (or parking). By following the walkway, it does at least match the real world a little bit.
Meanwhile, I’ve come across the exact same problem with the train station at Leeds. For some search terms it drops the pin in the middle of the platforms, which is closer to a (real) road to the south than the entrance to the north. Various combinations of “train” vs. “railway” plus “station” give differing positions.
So, I added this disconnected walking trail that vaguely follows the route someone might walk. Will test it in a couple days…
I’ve now replaced my fake dirt roads with walking trails for both North and South Gatwick terminals.
Based on what I’ve been told, I’m confident that the North Terminal should work.
For South Terminal, there seemed to be an annoying large number of possible points Waze could aim at, depending on whether the user input “Gatwick Airport” or “Gatwick Airport South Terminal”, and then which of several apparently identical options s/he plumped for. I’ve drawn a little network of walking trails to cover them all. The walking trail end point that I want Waze to navigate to is between the Departure and Arrival roads as you suggested.
My worry is that the walking trails cross not just the Upper Forecourt road, as required, but also the restricted Perimeter Road E and South Pier Rd down on the airport tarmac. Hopefully Waze will pick the “street” Upper Forecourt to navigate to rather than one of the "private road"s. I’ll find out in a couple of
days…
One little supplementary, should the walking trails be named (as at present) or innominate?
Edit: overlooked the fact that the walking trail also crosses the A23. My guess is that this is what Waze will navigate to, which won’t help at all. I think the dirt road may be coming back here, but I’ll wait until I can test the walking trail navigation first.
Waze is not navigating to the road which passes closest to either end of the walking trail - the public road adjacent to the east end of the trail.
Waze has instead reverted to navigating to the road which passes closest to the point identified by Google (or whatever), possibly because this is also the closest road to the west end of the walking trail. This is the restricted road which we are trying to avoid.
Any suggestions, or shall I revert to a dirt road linked to the public road?
I’ll add that it’s now several weeks since I tried to get Google to move the point for Robin Hood Airport from the centre of the runway (which is closer to roads behind the airport) to the terminal building. No change yet.
Its also been several months since I advised them that Timanfaya National Park in Lanzarote is not located 100 miles off the coast in the middle of the ocean.