davidg666 wrote:[I plan to update some parts of the Ireland section of the wiki in the near future - but before I do that, I hope to discuss the changes first in case there's any disagreement, since some of the changes I propose haven't been covered before and I think different editors amongst have different ways of doing things]

Third: Road types:

1. Motorways: “Freeway”

• N roads: “Major Highway”

• R roads: “Minor Highway”

• Major town/city/village roads: “Primary Street”

• Non-major town/city/village roads: “Street”

• Surfaced rural roads: “Street”

• Larger/busier rural roads that are not R roads: “Primary Street”

• Unsurfaced rural roads that cannot be easily used by a normal car: “Dirt road / 4X4 trail”

• Non-public roads (for example: college campuses, businesses, golf clubs, gated developments): “Private Road”

• Car parks: “Parking Lot Road”

• Don’t map every parking lot road - just access and perimeter

• Can use parking lot type in petrol stations to suppress traffic reports

Agree with all of these.
I think the only area of contention will be the labelling of some rural roads as either street or primary street. I have seen several times editors switching roads between the two.
My suggestion is fairly simple: the app zooms in and out of roads details depending on your speed of travel. I think the borderline between streets and primary streets is around 30 miles per hour (open to correction on this). If a road is of good enough quality to travel SAFELY above this speed, it should be labelled as a primary street; otherwise it just looks like you are driving on fresh air on the app and you can't see the road layout ahead.
Main issue with this suggestion is junctions between such roads: they could all look equal where they meet, even though they aren't in reality: would calling non-priority roads streets here be very messy?

davidg666 wrote: I've seen editors switching them back and forth too (and have been guilty of that myself). I might add some further elaboration to this part, but I think if a road is so narrow that two cars can't pass without one of them pulling over, then it should never be a primary street. Aside from that, I think the traffic volume, level of use and average speeds are partly what should determine the distinction between street and primary street.

I think it's another area that's up to the discretion of editors; I often use the density of GPS tracks in the editor as a hint. Maybe the only thing we can say definitively is that a road must be wide enough for two cars travelling in opposite directions to pass without pulling over or slowing down before it can be considered a primary street. If it's got grass growing down the middle, then it almost certainly isn't a primary street

That kinda matches what i was saying: if you have to pull in to pass each other, you should be driving quite slowly anyway, so the zoom level would probably be suitable for "street"

davidg666 wrote: I'm not quite sure what you mean here - but I think the important thing is to align the junction carefully so that minor roads meeting major roads always get a turn left/right instruction rather than a keep left/right instruction or no instruction at all (if it looks to Waze that there's just a bend in the route). This alignment consideration applies to all road types, not just streets/primary streets.

Sometimes have seen junctions where all roads are appropriate to label at the same level, but the main 2 are at a tight angle (e.g. a cross roads which isn't quite + shaped, where the main road comes from the south and turns west), and i want to head straight on, (north), the client doesn't know to tell me that i need to yield to oncoming traffic to turn right

Hi David

Sorry have been off line a bit lately.

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 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.

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.

bprob wrote:

davidg666 wrote: ...

• Surfaced rural roads: “Street”

• Larger/busier rural roads that are not R roads: “Primary Street”

...

Agree with all of these.
I think the only area of contention will be the labelling of some rural roads as either street or primary street. I have seen several times editors switching roads between the two.
My suggestion is fairly simple: the app zooms in and out of roads details depending on your speed of travel. I think the borderline between streets and primary streets is around 30 miles per hour (open to correction on this). If a road is of good enough quality to travel SAFELY above this speed, it should be labelled as a primary street; otherwise it just looks like you are driving on fresh air on the app and you can't see the road layout ahead.

I've seen editors switching them back and forth too (and have been guilty of that myself). I might add some further elaboration to this part, but I think if a road is so narrow that two cars can't pass without one of them pulling over, then it should never be a primary street. Aside from that, I think the traffic volume, level of use and average speeds are partly what should determine the distinction between street and primary street.

I think it's another area that's up to the discretion of editors; I often use the density of GPS tracks in the editor as a hint. Maybe the only thing we can say definitively is that a road must be wide enough for two cars travelling in opposite directions to pass without pulling over or slowing down before it can be considered a primary street. If it's got grass growing down the middle, then it almost certainly isn't a primary street

bprob wrote:Main issue with this suggestion is junctions between such roads: they could all look equal where they meet, even though they aren't in reality: would calling non-priority roads streets here be very messy?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here - but I think the important thing is to align the junction carefully so that minor roads meeting major roads always get a turn left/right instruction rather than a keep left/right instruction or no instruction at all (if it looks to Waze that there's just a bend in the route). This alignment consideration applies to all road types, not just streets/primary streets.

++David \ davidg666

bprob wrote:Sometimes have seen junctions where all roads are appropriate to label at the same level, but the main 2 are at a tight angle (e.g. a cross roads which isn't quite + shaped, where the main road comes from the south and turns west), and i want to head straight on, (north), the client doesn't know to tell me that i need to yield to oncoming traffic to turn right

Ah - got you now. I think this can be addressed with careful tweaking of the geometry of the junction and placing geometry nodes very close to the junction node to get the directions right to convince Waze to give the right instructions.

In the example you give (a cross roads where the main road comes in from the south and leaves from the west) two extra geometry nodes can convince Waze that following the main road is straight (and gives no instruction) but turning onto either of the two other roads (north or east in this example) is a right turn and gives the appropriate instruction.

I try to do this with any junctions like that - we seem to have lots of T-junctions where the main road bends to one side and the minor road joins in such a way that it looks like a continuation of part of the main road, but traffic entering the main road from the minor road (or turning onto the minor road from the major road) should always be given a turn left/right instruction, and traffic continuing on the major road should get no instruction. The risk is often that a well-meaning future editor might not notice the subtle extra geometry nodes and mess it up, but I guess that's the case with any editing.

++David \ davidg666

Alright: I've written a quick draft for the wiki page for naming and labelling roads. For the moment, it's here:

http://world.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Ho ... d%29_DRAFT

...after we've discussed it, revised it and agreed its approach, we can replace the existing page on naming and labelling roads with it.

All comments and discussion welcome!

++David \ davidg666

Hi Diarmuid,

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

I agree, they, umm, vary quite a lot - to put it nicely

However, unless we come up with a different way of categorising R- roads, I think making them all the same type in Waze is the simplest.

DiarmuidCogan wrote: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

We know the L-number for some local roads, but not most of them; it helps when there's a sign at the end, but when there isn't, I don't know of a useful way to find out what it is.

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.

Even though roads of type "street" vary an awful lot, at least Waze will work out from the speeds that people do on these roads that some are slow and some are quite quick, and it should favour the faster roads over the slower ones.

DiarmuidCogan wrote: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?

At least this one is more straightforward ... I don't know about Father, Sister and Doctor, but at least Saint (maybe the most common one?) will be pronounced right by TTS if there's a dot after it - so "St." should be pronounced as "Saint" and "St" as "Street". We seem to have no dot in most cases, but I've been sticking it in wherever I see it.

As for the pronunciation of N: Waze fixed this a few months ago, so something like "N76" does now get pronounced as "enn seventy-six" but "M8 N" gets pronounced as "emm eight north". If your phone is still always pronouncing "N" as "north", you should flush your TTS cache (navigate to "cc@tts" to do this).

++David \ davidg666

Hi Diarmuid,

DiarmuidCogan wrote:

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.

Alrighty; how about this then:

- 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 andthose like roads within housing estates) to be of type "street".

If you think this is good, then I'll wait a few days for the other Ireland editors to weigh in with their opinions, and then I'll update the draft accordingly.

Thanks for your input! I was beginning to wonder if anybody had seen my post about the draft ... although I'd also let it slide for ages myself (along with the other new wiki pages I have planned...)

DiarmuidCogan wrote: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.

Do report back! Certainly worth trying out. I reckon there's a reasonable chance Dr. might work, but I'd be quite surprised if Fr. and Sr. do. In any case, where they appear on relatively short road names, there's no reason why we can't spell them out in full.

++David \ davidg666

Hi Diarmuid, other editors,

DiarmuidCogan wrote:

davidg666 wrote: - 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.

Alright - I've updated the "Road Types" section of the draft wiki page - see here.

Let me know if you think this covers the summary above.

All other editors: please weigh in and give your opinion; I hope to make this draft page the 'official' page for road types in Ireland in the near future - but I'd like as much agreement as possible first.

++David \ davidg666