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Airports

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I have a delivery driver who used the paved road feature in the app to pave some service roads through the airport. He then submitted two URs asking that they be put in. I'm impressed about this effort and I wish there were more drivers like him. I applaud that he understand what to do when something's not right in Waze, but that's beside the point.

I informed him, as a general rule we don't label or mark the roads inside the property lines of the airport that aren't conducive to traffic. The roads to the terminals for passengers are the primary roads we'll put into Waze, but I also told him I'd check on a few things. ATL, IAH, MDW, MIA, FLL, MSY, SAT, AUS, SEA, LAS, DFW, ORD, BOS, NWK, LGA, don't have any of the service roads marked. LAX, DIA, PDX, and JFK do. Those were just some of the airports I had checke. I wasn't going to check all of the airports around the country.

My question is, are those roads really conducive to the typical Waze user? Do we really need to mark them all with private roads, or service roads? Is there a possibility that Waze would direct someone to a terminal using those roads? I'm not convinced on putting them in, as it's only going to benefit maybe 150 people out of the 3000+ that use Waze in S Florida. I haven't had any issues with it in while I was in San Antonio, or editing in Texas.

Another thing I noticed is the airports are set up entirely differently across the country. Some are landmarked, some have layers of landmarks, some have their airport codes in them, and others don't. I know this is asking a lot, but could we come to a general consensus about setting these all the same, throughout the country?

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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
I've got service roads within the secure area mapped because others map them anyway and I can't stop it. I have made sure they do not connect to anything outside the fence, though.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
At PDX, the economy parking (red and blue lots), short-term and long-term parking landmarks work, as do the arrivals and departures landmarks. That is, you can search these and route to them. The economy blue lot is odd-shaped, so the Waze destination point needs work.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
I think airports do need to be treated as a different type of Private Installation, as the guidelines call for now. The density is an issue, sure, but the fact that airports serve the very purpose of "public" transportation and that a good number, possibly a majority, of Wazers have entered in a search for an airport into Waze before, means they need to be considered carefully. I doubt 25% of Wazers have entered in a military base as a destination before.

With pretty good success now, I can get Waze to bring up good airport search results, depending on what you enter. I have short, long-term and economy lots entered into Waze, as well as the location for arriving and departing flights, the cell phone waiting area, etc. They all appear in the app-side search now and the directions to each are good. The only issue we continue to have with search is the lack of meta data to attach to the landmarks/POI so that we can capture more search data.
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Post by Bigbear3764
You must have looked at O'Hare after the service roads were removed. They popped up there a couple weeks ago. Great if you are driving a baggage cart around the airport. My paver responded to my PM and removed them.

I guess naming should be what someone is going to search for. Then you have the airports that will route wrong if the landmark is named. We had to take the name off Midway airport because the arrival/departure terminal is actually across the street from the airport. So the airport is just labeled that and the terminal is named Midway Airport Arrivals/Departures. O'Hare was fine because the terminal was under the landmark.


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Post by CBenson
vectorspace wrote:To continue the differentiation: What's different about this situation and military bases?

== Airport private road networks tend to be closer to public road networks.
This is a huge critical difference. Its not just that they tend to be closer to public road networks, its that they are always close to public roads networks that are relied upon by huge numbers of travelers that rely on the GPS devices to route them to.
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Post by ctpoole
Airports are especially interesting to me since I fly on business a lot.

When I use Waze to get to an unfamiliar airport I have specific needs and I believe we should map to meet those needs.

1) I may have never been there before so I have two places I need to get to; the rental car return and departures.
2) airports often have separated arrivals and departure roads and I need to be on the right one with good instructions
3) when there are multiple terminals, I need the A, B, C or 1,2,3 that the airline uses as part of the name
4) airports tend to have a lot of directional signs so we need to match instructions to that
5) its nice to see a big landmark as I drive towards the airport so I know I am not lost

Now as a private pilot as well, having the airport code in the landmark of small airports is helpful. In Texas I have been adding those as I see small fields.
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Post by ctpoole
I really don't see why someone using Waze would be inside the security fence. Its one of the reasons I have always questioned things like mapping runways and taxiways. I guess that some "delivery" type vehicles do come and go through the security checkpoints so I would think that delivery routes might warrant being mapped.
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Post by ctpoole
I took a look at what had been done at the airports mentioned so far and just added a landmark for ABIA in Austin. I know there used to be one, but someone must have deleted it.

As an experiment for the search system I added a very small "Rental Car Return" landmark at the point where people should enter the joint return facility on top of the existing Parking structure. I am going to wait a couple of days and see if it shows up in the search returns. If it does, that might be a way to deal with rental car returns.
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Post by ctpoole
EWR is nEWaRk. It would have been NWR but all airfield codes starting with N are reserved to the Navy.
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Post by ctpoole
By the way, the small landmark I added at AUS for the car rental return works perfectly. Additionally having the road to it named Car Rental Return gets you to the road which is almost as good but could confuses some expecting turn instructions to get onto the road. The landmark is better in my opinion.
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