William Nicol Dr

Map Editors Community South Africa: Gauteng
1

I’m considering unsplitting William Nicol. The amount of work involved with this will probably be fairly significant, which is one of the reasons I’m fairly hesitant about doing this, but I’m probably the one mostly responsible for it being split in the first place so I guess that’ll serve as my penance :wink: So far, this is what I’ve been able to come up with:

Reasons for unsplitting:

Vastly simplifying the N1 / William Nicol onramp/offramp.
Potentially simplifying the William Nicol / Main Rd intersection.
Unsplit is better than split, in general.

Reasons for keeping it split:

William Nicol is a large throughfare, with 3 lanes or more in places and a 5m+ well-defined median in several sections.
The intersection with Main Rd may be challenging to map correctly without the William Nicol direction being split into two lanes, so unsplitting will just make this more complex.

Regarding the N1 onramp/offramp:

This consists of 4 ramps meeting with the two directions of travel along William Nicol in a single intersection with a single 3-phase traffic signal, along with the 4 other ramps splitting off before the intersection. Currently the way this is mapped on Waze is extremely complicated, with the ramps intersecting at different places instead of a single junction on the bridge; it may be possible to transform this into a single junction even without unsplitting William Nicol, but I think it’ll be much easier with it unsplit.

I’m not in any rush to do this work, and the road is perfectly navigable as-is, so I’m very much interested in other people’s opinions on this.

2

I certainly wouldn’t think that the entire length of William Nicol should be unsplit. Most of William Nicol does have a pretty wide island in the middle and with the many lanes we will probably sit with plenty of horrible paved bits.

If it’s not broken, why fix it? :lol:

3

Whoops, I forgot to follow up on this post. I decided against unsplitting it in the end based on some discussions elsewhere; although as a separate matter, I turned it into Minor Highway :wink:

I still need to go through and turn all the U-turn-prohibited intersections into mapcat bowties, but there are actually fewer of those than I thought.