Waze uses dangerous or low capacity road for alternate route

Map Editors Community United States California
1

I’d like some comment and advice on ways to solve a problem that crops up in the Santa Cruz Mountains with some frequency during the winter. I have a specific example (https://www.waze.com/en-US/editor/?env=usa&lon=-122.04664&lat=37.08704&zoom=4&mapUpdateRequest=8339158) but it’s more of a general problem.

In this example, E Zayante Rd is defined by FC as a PS. It’s long, winding, and narrow, with partial washouts and hairpin turns that make it inappropriate for larger vehicles and for drivers unfamiliar with the road. SR-17, the main, heavily traveled highway between San Jose and Santa Cruz, is subject to major closures during the winter due to slides, trees down, major accidents and such. When these incidents happen, Waze will offer E Zayante Rd as the preferred new route. The first car through may be ok, or the second, but because of the characteristics of E Zayante it doesn’t take long for it to be completely overwhelmed. Once committed, drivers can’t turn around or otherwise get themselves out of the situation. Larger vehicles may completely block the road because they can’t make the switchbacks. The detour is inappropriate partly because it’s dangerous and scary, and partly because it doesn’t have capacity to handle the traffic.

My goal is to prevent E Zayante from being used by Waze as an alternative through route, without preventing routing to local destinations or outbound routing, and without violating guidance.

I’ve considered setting a segment at each end as “unpaved”, or marking it as a gated community, even though neither is true. I’m interested in any suggestions or discussion. If we can get consensus on an appropriate solution, it can be used on other similar situations.

2

Zayante and the other mountain roads can be trouble on warm summer weekends too, because as you know, the beach traffic to Santa Cruz in the morning and back to the Bay Area in the evening turns 17 into a parking lot. I’ve seen some awful traffic in places like Seattle, San Francisco, LA, and New York City, but the summer beach traffic on 17 these days is as bad or worse.

When 17 gets that way, all but the most severe penalties don’t mean poo anymore and Waze will try to equalize the traffic pressure using every available road.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, Waze has provided no good tools to cope with this problem. It’s based on a penalty system, not a capacity system; as far as Waze is concerned, every road has the same capacity as a freeway and there’s no way we can tell it otherwise.

Of course we can start throwing down Private Road road types but as we all know that can have unintended consequences on local drivers (of which I’m one :mrgreen:). We can do things to moderately increase the penalties, like use the “unpaved” checkbox or even the “difficult turn” applied as a straight-ahead onto the difficult road, but I’m unsure how much good moderate penalties will do when 17 is stopped cold.

I too would love higher-level guidance on this.

3

I was told that this would be a good forum to post my current issue.

We live in Los Angeles on some very narrow two way hillside streets (intersection of Hillcrest, Sycamore, and Camrose). These streets provide a cut through for drivers coming off the 101 freeway that want to avoid the center of Hollywood on their way to points west.

We have been documenting the traffic nightmare for years and some of the examples of what happens on our streets can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxlrmHbhQkR7ZwMWiXNQpGw?view_as=subscriber

We have tried to work with Waze to no avail. When I marked streets as private, our neighborhood went back to normal and I thought the nightmare was over. Unfortunately, all of the streets were locked from level 1 editing and now our streets are back to screaming, raging, racing drivers during rush hour and beyond.

We have been working with our Councilmember to try to address this more holistically with DOT. However, I am wondering if there is a higher level editor who can help me out with suggestions in the meantime. As you can see from the videos, the problem is a public safety issue.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

4

As noted above, there is a general design approach in Waze that makes it difficult to control situations like this, with people bypassing normal routes and driving through residential neighborhoods. That being said, I would think that if drivers are truly misbehaving as described, and not just driving through in uncomfortable numbers, it should be possible to control the situation somewhat with enforcement and/or speed bumps.

In general, the Waze map editor community doesn’t like to close streets that are really open, or mark streets as Private when they aren’t, or prohibit turns when they are really allowed, etc. It may reduce the undesirable diversion of traffic onto quiet residential streets, but it also interferes with normal navigation for Uber, pizza delivery, etc. :slight_smile:

There are some similarities between this situation and the one that started this thread, but also some major differences. It’s likely that the solutions are different. But it’s true that there are local neighborhoods everywhere that are being negatively impacted by Waze and other navigation apps sending too many cars over streets that can’t accommodate them.

We would need some pretty serious software changes from developers in order to deal with the capacity issue.

Just my 2 cents…

5

True. In my opinion, there are only two “legitimate” alternatives to SR-17 (on a macro basis) - SR-9 and Soquel-San Jose Rd/Old Santa Cruz Highway. Neither has anywhere near the capacity, but at least they’re safe mostly (unless they’re closed too). There are a few roads for short bypass, like Glenwood. But to bypass congestion between Santa Cruz and San Jose, pretty much every other road should be avoided for safety reasons at least. Oh, I guess you could take SR-1 up to SR-92 as well, depending on your final destination.

6

Would this be a good test case for the currently unapproved road type “Passageway”?
Clearly would require RC approval.

7

FC has this road as a PS. That’s another can of - uh - worms? I’m thinking anything we do here is a job for RC… :sunglasses:

In any case,the road is perfectly fine for standard passenger vehicles, one at a time. It just can’t handle larger vehicles, or very many vehicles.

8

Unfortunately for many if not most potential US applications the “Passageway” type is a false hope, a chimera. It pretends to solve the problem but it would usually have little useful impact.

Despite the name, Waze thinks “Passageways” have the same capacity and safety as freeways. The instant the time penalties work out, Waze will just as happily send a thousand Wazers down a Passageway as it would one.

The problem we have in the Santa Cruz Mountains (I’m not familiar with other regions and can’t speak to them) is that we have only one high-capacity road over the mountains between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. Once that is sufficiently clogged, the time penalties – for all Wazers – flip to favoring dangerous little side roads.

Fussing with the time penalties (to the extent the few tools we have let us do that) might change the time that flip occurs somewhat, but as the clog gets worse the flip will still take place and the end result will be every bit as bad.

Every technique we could try will either have little effect or will have serious drawbacks, unless I’m missing something. This really feels above my pay grade.

9

So our streets definitely need to be changed to Passageway, but the entire neighborhood was penalized for marking the streets as Private and it requires a higher level editor than I. Are any of you able to change Camrose Dr, and Fitch, Hillcrest and Sycamore between Franklin and Hillcrest to “Passageway”? Or can you have the restriction removed so I am able to make the change myself?

Thanks,

10

I know it doesn’t permanently fix the issue, but every little bit helps.

11

I’m not personally familiar with the Camrose Dr area or problems and can’t speak to specific solutions. What I can tell you is what I said above, the “Passageway” type is for most cases in the US a chimera, a mirage. It offers us only false hope. It was designed for places in other parts of the world that have a lot less traffic (and a lot more motorcycles). With our level of traffic and penetration of the Waze app it won’t solve anything.

Again, as far as Waze is concerned, every road has the capacity of a freeway and there’s not a blessed thing we volunteers can do about it. It’s a fundamental design problem in Waze.

If a public neighborhood can get legally enforceable signs put up that effectively turn it into a private neighborhood, that can be mapped. Sometimes putting a stop to the through traffic is a simple as placing a sign restricting a single, carefully-selected turn M-F between 3 pm and 8 pm; that’s trivially easy to put on the Waze map.

But we don’t have the authority to declare on our own that public streets should be unavailable to the public, and we don’t have the technology to tell Waze that it shouldn’t send every Wazer in the area down a low-capacity side road because it will quickly saturate. This is a very thorny issue.

12

The Passageway road type is not currently approved for use here. As mentioned above, the benefit would be minimal, and the unintended consequences are myriad. The Passageway road type was designed for countries where there is a high percentage of motorcycle traffic, which can use narrow alleyways common in those countries (narrower than just about anything we have in the US) much more easily than can a passenger vehicle.

TimGrantCool,
thank you for your PM. I’ll be responding directly to you via PM as soon as I can. I live in your area: the situation is complex, and may require a lengthy discussion, which may take me some time to compose, and I’m on a limited time budget at the moment.

13

Wait, I’m not following the logic here. We’re still not allowed to use the Passageway road type in the US, unless something changed very recently. I think DwarfLord’s point was that it wouldn’t help, not that we could do it.

14

I think TimGrantCool is not familiar with our current Waze Map Editor guidance on the use of Passageway. We will not be using Passageway for these streets.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

15

I don’t have much to add here – just observing that the two prime examples here are very different in terms of context: the Santa Cruz mountains, and Los Angeles city. To me, this evokes the extreme difficulty in Waze editors embarking on a set of “standard guidelines” for how to handle these low-capacity-but-legal alt-routes. The vast difference in the scenarios makes it difficult to conjure up a set of general principles or rules for how to handle. I note that there is another active California thread about mountain routes when US-50 is under “chain control” that has some similarities to these situations.

We’ve learned that emergency personnel use Waze to a great extent, especially when there’s a regional disaster and volunteers from across the state, or even across the country, come to assist, and they have no prior familiarity with the area. I worked on the Waze response to Hurricane Florence, and one of the editor debates was how to handle the bridge closures to the Outer Banks of N.C. The bridges were closed to all but Priority 1 responders, many of whom did not have prior knowledge. In some cases (where there was evidence of ongoing evacuation efforts), we opted to leave the bridges open in Waze to maximize the utility of Waze for emergency responders. I bring this up, as I think the Santa Cruz mountain scenario may include this dimension given there is only one viable route (SR-17), and so what would happen if that artery is cut? The LA neighborhood is more prickly – ideally Waze would react quickly enough that after sending a few cars along that route, Waze would “max out” and no longer suggest it. Perhaps future Waze routing improvements will identify roads that quickly reach and exceed capacity and dial back routing along those corridors.

I also note (and this may evoke some controversy) that the videos of the LA neighborhood show cars parked along the street, and also show poorly maintained roadways. Ultimately the city or other competent government authority needs to determine whether residents get priority to park along the street, greatly impeding two-way traffic, or whether the roads should be maintained for the benefit of other taxpayers or fellow passers-thru, in which case the parallel parking should be prohibited and the roads maintained.

In summary, I don’t think it’s right that Waze treats roads like E Zayante and the LA neighborhood as full-capacity; nor do I think we should take actions that effectively strike the from the map as there could be consequences to emergency responders, nearby residents and others. Taking an alternate approach (a set of “rules”) effectively puts Waze and/or the volunteer editors into a position of adjudicating road-worthiness. IF Waze decided that this is a route to take (pun intended), perhaps it should employ a set of professionals to make these decisions rather than relying on volunteers, akin to Facebook or other media companies that wrestle with content decisions, get hauled before Congress, get lambasted, etc. etc.

So, at risk of being accused of “passing the buck”, my recommendations are: (1) to reinforce the primary role of local competent government authorities for determining whether routes are “allowed” or not, and (2) to strongly encourage Waze to put effort into detecting “low capacity” routes (ones that experience low traffic and when traffic increases, experience sharp degradations in transit times), and to algorithmically account for these sorts of roads, by throttling the routing therupon.

16

I can come up with at least six distinct routing problems that may require different (although perhaps related) solutions.

Waze favors through drivers by routing:

  • through neighborhoods that, while public, were not designed or intended for through traffic.

Waze favors local drivers by routing:

  • through neighborhoods with a history of violence towards unfamiliar visitors;
  • on roads that visiting drivers may find “scary” due to grades, lack of maneuvering room, etc.

Waze favors nobody at all by routing:

  • on roads that may be temporarily impassible due to weather conditions (e.g. heavy snow);
  • on roads that were not designed to support the size or weight of the driver’s vehicle; and
  • on roads that lack the capacity to handle many Wazers at once.

I agree that the volunteer community has simply not been given the tools to respond effectively to these concerns. (I have heard that Waze has made available an in-house solution to the dangerous-neighborhoods problem, but that it is not available worldwide.)

Without proper tools or support from Waze, anything the volunteer community does to attempt to solve these problems would be like using a hammer to tighten a screw.

If we assume no tools or support from Waze will be forthcoming, the question changes from “what is the best solution” to “what is the least bad solution”. Much though I hate to say it, “doing nothing” may in fact be the least bad solution until such time as Waze provides the tools to deal with these issues properly. Of course, when legally-enforceable signs are put up, we do have the tools to map those, and this is how we’ve been handling such problems to date.

17

Waze is a victim of its own success, in part. In the old days, there were fewer Wazers, so virtually all of them could be directed down a low-capacity road without serious impact. These days, that’s not the case - Waze by itself can quickly impact a low-capacity road, and other actors (e.g. Google Maps) just multiply the effect.

I think a distinction should be made between roads that are dangerous and roads that just have low capacity. E Zayante is long, so it can store lots of vehicles, and it’s winding with steep dropoffs and hairpin turns where trucks can get “hung up”. Once committed, drivers can’t get out except by going forward. Most city streets, OTOH, may become clogged with traffic but at least people can turn around or choose another of dozens of alternates.

Quite possibly we need help from Waze developers to solve this issue, but it doesn’t feel right to me to just ignore it because it’s difficult.

18

OK, here’s one potential solution. The California editing community could decide that the “avoid unpaved roads” checkbox shall actually be interpreted in California to mean “avoid unpaved OR challenging roads”. We could then apply that attribute to E Zayante and several other small roads through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Drivers who complain could be told to check the box that says “avoid unpaved roads” and that, in California, “unpaved” means “unpaved or challenging”.

This gives us something to do about this problem, and something to tell unhappy drivers that could improve their experience. It will add a time penalty for E Zayante for those drivers, which as has been mentioned many times in this thread will accomplish nothing once 17 jams. It isn’t a capacity solution, but if there are moderate slowdowns on 17 it will at least discourage routing via E Zayante.

A downside is that drivers who only care about surface type and don’t care about surface quality or anything else (I’m told such drivers are plentiful, at least in some parts of the country) will find that certain paved (but challenging) roads are no longer offered to them.

There are likely other downsides with this approach. I’d appreciate someone pointing them out here before I or anyone else goes through the ordeal of proposing it as a California wiki change :mrgreen:

19

What about the “gated community” approach? My understanding is that this will at least penalize through traffic, and in the case of E Zayante it appears that it is signed “No Through Traffic” (I’m waiting for access to the Reporter’s Google Drive - when I get access I’ll post their pictures). E Zayante is somewhat self-contained - it’s not like we’d be gating the entire Santa Cruz Mountains. Relative to other penalties, will a couple of PR segments at each end hold back the flood longer than making a long segment “unpaved”? My understanding is that “unpaved” only applies to people who choose to avoid (“longer”) unpaved roads. [Edit] Reporter photos posted below. Sign says “Local Traffic Only”, not “No Through Traffic”. Does this mean the same thing? Not consistent with PS type.[/Edit]

20

(unavailable attachment: 2019-02-28_09-44-29.pdf)(unavailable attachment: 2019-02-28_09-43-21.pdf)(unavailable attachment: 2019-02-28_09-42-20.pdf)(unavailable attachment: 2019-02-28_09-39-52.pdf)