Hi Rob,

bprob wrote:Regarding the road types, the more I drive and edit, I see that there is no relationship between quality of road and the rating it is given.

Was in Mayo this week and several R roads with 100km limits were just plain ridiculous.

However, we have to work within what we have so I would say in Waze, we have to stick to the broad categorisations you suggest.

I agree - there's certainly a vast variation in road quality within the same road type - we have N- roads that are comparable to motorways, and other N- roads that are narrower and windier than R- roads - and the variations carry on like that all the way down to the humblest road.

I certainly think all N- roads should share the same type, and the same for all R- roads, despite the variation. Waze's routing favours higher road types, but even if (say) the R- roads in a particular area aren't the best ever, we still want Waze to favour them over some even worse roads. It makes life much easier for editors too: once we know that a road is an R-, N- or M- road, we know what type it should be.

On to the smaller roads though:

bprob wrote:I have one caveat, which I have mentioned previously: L roads.
The strongest evidence for the lack of relationship between road quality and naming lies with the L roads: The ones from 0001 to 4999 are not, as a group, that much better than the ones named 5000 to 8999.

Some are much better, some are slightly better, some are the same, some are worse and some are much worse!!
The L roads from 10000+ are almost universally of a lower standard.

I really feel that we cannot categorise ALL L0001-L4999 as Primary St, just as we cannot categorise ALL L5000-8999 as Street. There will be some overlap between the two.
Also in some new urban areas, the higher numbers are being used on new roads, for the simple reason that the smaller numbers have already been used in that county.

As mentioned previously, Editors should use their common sense: The app will zoom out depending on the speed you are travelling.

If the road is of a standard good enough to allow you drive at a speed (safely and cars can pass each other) where it is visible when slightly zoomed out, we should use Primary street, if you have to drive slower, it should be street.

You have a good point; although I changed the draft wiki page after Diarmuid's remarks, there are plenty of places where there are good L- roads with numbers above 5000 and bad L-roads with numbers below 5000. As well as that, we only occasionally know the L-number of a smaller road, because there are only sometimes signs at the end (some counties seem to better than this than others, of course).

So I'm inclined to agree: editors should use common sense. In general, all paved roads that aren't designated as R- roads should be of type 'Street', but those that have high traffic volumes, or are considered 'trunk' roads, or are wide and high quality (and, most importantly, are wide enough to allow to two cars to pass without slowing down) can then be of type 'Primary Street' - but up to the editor's discretion and sense.

I won't change the draft just yet until we hear from a couple more editors - Diarmuid Cogan has been active on this thread recently, and I'm hoping Arthur O'Hara will give his opinion too.

(in any case, even after we turn the draft page into the 'official' page, that doesn't mean it's set in stone - we can change it again in the future. (although I would prefer not to make any non-trivial changes without discussion on the forum first)).

bprob wrote:Roads with grass down the middle are still paved roads. If you can't see dirt either side, its not a dirt road. It shouldn't be categorised as such, it should be a street. Dirt roads are plentiful in the west, leading into bogs etc and are often private. They can be distinguished from each other.

If we categorised all roads with grass in the middle as dirt roads, there would be an awful lot of the NW, W and SW unnavigable in the app.

Agreed; there are many narrow paved roads that have grass down the middle. If a road really is just dirt, only then should be called a dirt road. (thankfully, unlike Australia and New Zealand (and probably other places) we don't have major highways that are dirt (really!)).

If anybody reading this is in touch with any of the other serious editors, please ask them to give their opinions on this thread!

++David \ davidg666

Have you driven on some of our "important" Regional roads? They're barely Street level!

Local roads in Ireland are designated with an L and subdivided into primary local, secondary local & tertiary local depending on how high the number is. Should we not stick to that system and use something like the following:

Primary Street L1000 - L4999
Street L5000 - L8999
For L10001 & up we could use Street or Dirt Road/4x4 trail depending on whether there's grass in the middle and how bad the surface is

Is there some way of persuading the TTS to pronounce St Finbarr's, Fr Dominic, etc. as Saint, Father, Sister, Doctor or whatever and to not pronounce the N in National as North?

Hi Dave,

I agree that some L- roads are quite good, but others are very narrow and aren't much better than laneways. I do think that very good L- roads with high quality and lots of traffic should have be primary streets and others should just be 'street', but I'm not sure about using Dirt Road/4x4 trail, because for many people this is the only way to get somewhere - and if somebody as "avoid dirt roads" turned on on their phone, there will be many places they just can't get to at all with Waze.

I take your point, however, where the road numbers are known I think we should use the same convention as the DoE/RSA/CCs and keep the low numbers as Primary and the higher number (even the ones that are barely drivable ) as Street.

Thanks for the info about the N roads, I've cleared my cache.

I've started to rename my local Saint names as St. now too. I wonder if I did Fr./Sr./Dr. would the TTS take note. Might try it on one or two, see if it does and report back.

HI David,

davidg666 wrote: - All R-roads to be of type "minor highway"
- Roads outside of towns/cities/villages that have a known L-number:
1. L1000-L4999 to be of type "primary street"
2. L5000 and up to be of type "street"
- Roads outside of towns/cities/villages whose L-number is unknown:
1. High-quality roads with high traffic volumes to be of type "primary street"
2. All lesser roads to be of type "street"
- Roads within cities that are nor R- or N- roads:
1. Trunk roads/streets with high traffic volumes to be of type "primary street"
2. Minor roads/streets (smaller ones and those like roads within housing estates) to be of type "street".

That all makes perfect sense to me.