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Post by davidg666
Hi Des,
CTCNetwork wrote:Anyone find pump dot ie to be a good source of info on stations, brand and details?
http://pumps.ie ? I used to use it a little on the phone a couple of years ago, but there are quite a few petrol stations around where I live and work, so I stopped bothering with it. Looking at the website for the area around me right now, quite a lot of the prices seem to be over a week out of date.

I guess they are (or would be if/when Waze enable petrol prices for Ireland) a competitor to Waze for this one function.

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Post by davidg666
Hi Des,
CTCNetwork wrote:Yea, the prices did look a little out of date compared to my visit. I was thinking that it may be a good reference point for finding petrol stations and who operated them.. :) May help speed up completion of the stations.
Although I understand one can't copyright facts, I can imagine the people behind pumps.ie getting a bit annoyed if we were seen to be using their database as a source for Waze petrol stations. I do notice they have a feature for users to submit new petrol stations to be created - this would be very useful to have in Waze (not that I can imagine them adding it any time soon).

I know in the UK you managed to do a bulk import of some petrol stations (and the Esso database must have included stations in Ireland too, because a lot of them showed up here around the same time). I notice too (from lurking in the Australia forum) that they've been getting lists of petrol stations from the main brands and adding those manually. It would probably be worth doing something similar here.

To be perfectly honest, I haven't been too fussed about adding petrol stations in bulk myself (although I do add the odd one as I see it) - I don't use pumps.ie and usually have several petrol stations on my commute between home and work, so I haven't perceived the petro^Wgas stations feature in Waze to be that much use - not that others might not find it very useful indeed. I suppose it would be quite a useful thing to add to encourage more people to use Waze in the first place.

In summary: I think the best way to add enough petrol stations to the Ireland map (so that the prices feature could be enabled by Waze) would be to contact the main petrol station brands (Topaz, Applegreen, etc) and get lists of stations from them. We could then either add each station manually, or, if a list with coordinates could be provided in a standard format to Waze, perhaps it could be bulk-imported.

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Post by davidg666
dmeehan wrote:Is there an agreed convention for adding "Gas Stations" to the map?
I don't think we've ever discussed it here, but I reckon we should follow the same conventions as other places. I add "gas station" landmarks from time to time, and I see others do too.

We do have all the petrol brands imported by Waze, so they should all appear in the drop-down list for gas station landmarks.

When adding a landmark, I make it follow the boundary of the petrol station as a whole (not just the canopy over the pumps). If it's too small it won't be visible in the client. Since the landmark suppresses traffic reports, it's important to make sure it doesn't overlap any adjacent roads. I usually also add a one-way parking lot road through the petrol station too, so that people get routed off properly. Parking lot roads also ensure that people filling up get snapped to that road instead of the adjacent road, further preventing corruption of speed data for the road.

It looks like we're a long way from getting the petrol prices feature turned on for Ireland - I think Waze need a country to have 75% of its petrol stations mapped. I haven't bothered mapping that many petrol stations since a lot of them would be in places where we don't even have the town/village (and associated roads) mapped completely yet.

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Post by davidg666
dmeehan wrote:pumps.ie is down at the moment. Has anyone looked at this recently? Is it gone for good or just a momentary glitch?
There's a thread on boards.ie that suggests it's a bit bouncy - which doesn't really answer your question, but the reliability seems to be a bit questionable.

I notice the iPhone app isn't working either - it claims that it can't connect to the server - which I assume is related.

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:More than 82% according to this?
Maybe, it's time to activate this feature in Waze which was very useful when I was using it in UK/FR.
Aha - well spotted! I wonder who supplied that information for the spreadsheet.

I'll get on to Waze in a few days (poke me if you don't hear anything) and ask them to enable this. I won't do it immediately because I already have an email full of requests outstanding and I don't want to overwhelm them.

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Post by davidg666
An update on the petrol prices feature:

On the assumption that we have 82+% of our petrol stations mapped, I've just sent a message to Waze HQ to ask them to turn on the feature for Ireland. Let's see what happens next.

If it does get turned on, this should be a good incentive to get as many missing petrol stations mapped as possible, and to watch out for incorrectly mapped petrol stations.

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Post by davidg666
Another update on the petrol prices feature:

I've just heard back from Waze HQ that they're going to turn on the gas prices feature for Ireland. I'm not sure how long this takes, but they've said they'll let us know when the process is done.

It wouldn't hurt for all editors to keep an eye out for unmapped or incorrectly mapped petrol stations as part of their routine editing work. Once the feature goes live, I imagine we'll get plenty of URs for missing or wrongly mapped petrol stations, but the more petrol stations we have mapped, the more useful the feature will be for Waze users.

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:Is the list of brands up to date? I hope it won't take them too long if we need to update it like a adding GO?
Good question - do you think we're missing (m)any brands?

This thread is from when we compiled the list of brands to submit to Waze, but as you can see it was a while ago, so if we need to add any more brands, we can ask Waze HQ to do that.

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:
davidg666 wrote:do you think we're missing (m)any brands?
Here's a copy of the pretty complete list posted in 2012 (good starting point I guess):
(*) listed in WME on 13/09/15
Amber*
[snip...]
Xpress Stop
I'm not sure how we got from this list to the much shorter list that appears in WME now. I'm not familiar with many of these brands - do you think it would be best to have a more limited list that contains the most popular brands, and then use the existing "Independent Retailer" brand for brands that just have one or two petrol stations?

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Post by davidg666
lsin023 wrote:Anyway, I think a limited list with the most popular/cheapest brands would be wise. ;)
In that case, do you think there's anything important missing from the current list?

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