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Albany Airport runways/taxiways deleted?

Post by jdwaters
A few days ago I added the runways and taxiways of the Albany Airport. Before doing so, I consulted the wiki and the forums to make sure that mapping runways and taxiways is appropriate, and checked that other airports large (e.g. LAX, PDX) and small (e.g. YKM, SQL) are mapped. I made sure that the runways and taxiways were of type Runway/Taxiway and did not connect with the road grid. Over the next couple days I went back into the map editor and made a few corrections. Each time I went back in, the runways and taxiways were still present.

Today when I logged in, I noticed that the runways and taxiways are gone (except for the northernmost 41 meter segment of runway 19, which was mysteriously spared), although other changes I made in the same editing sessions (e.g. various changes to residential streets as well as the the runways and taxiways of the Saratoga County Airport) are still present. I have received no PM's alerting me to problems with my edits. Anyone have any idea what might have happened? It's obviously a waste of time to edit the map if my changes are going to disappear without notice....
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Post by AndyPoms
Since you can't drive a car on them, why should they be mapped? I do think we need to come up with a guidelines for this (and I've posed the question to the US Champs)... I know we've played with a few things over the past few years - there was one point where we maped some of them (that had people clearly paving into/out of them while on a plane), but name them "DO NOT WAZE ON A PLANE"...
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Post by AndyPoms
Just a quick update, the US Champs are discussing guidelines for Runways (map/not map, & if mapped, how do we name them). Once we come up with a recommendation, we typically open up a thread for comments/
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Post by DwarfLord
jdwaters, was your effort at Albany like this one in Santa Barbara?

I do admire the diligence involved in mapping the curves and taxiways! And I acknowledge that the resulting image on the navigation screen is readily recognizable as an airport.

At the same time the predominant Waze practice of representing a landmark like an airport as a labeled, colored, polygonal blob has its own stylistic charm, valuing simplicity over complexity, and I don't believe it really sacrifices anything important for drivers. It also announces (rather strongly) that there is no attempt being made to compete with other apps that do place a premium on literal imagery. That's a good thing IMHO.
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Post by DwarfLord
Apologies jdwaters, I misunderstood. You must have simply mapped the Albany runways and taxiways with the corresponding road type, as opposed to crafting the Airport landmark outlines to match the tarmac boundaries as was done for Santa Barbara.

I have no opinion on marking runways and taxiways using their assigned road type. There are so few airports it certainly wouldn't be an issue of map clutter. My reaction was based on thinking that you applied the Santa Barbara approach.
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Post by jdwaters
AndyPoms wrote:Since you can't drive a car on them, why should they be mapped?

I do think we need to come up with a guidelines for this (and I've posed the question to the US Champs)... I know we've played with a few things over the past few years - there was one point where we maped some of them (that had people clearly paving into/out of them while on a plane), but name them "DO NOT WAZE ON A PLANE"...
The reason I mapped them is for recognition at a glance. Long straight intersecting runways on a map are immediately recognizable as an airport, whereas a big purple blob is less obvious. Google Maps and my Garmin car GPS have runways mapped, and I've always found them to be helpful when navigating near an airport.

Having the taxiways mapped is of slight navigational benefit for airport users. At general aviation airports it is somewhat common for street vehicles to drive on taxiways to reach hangars and aviation businesses (e.g. Saratoga Springs, where the parking lot for the two glider hangars is reachable only by driving on taxiways). Having the taxiways depicted on the map is helpful, but they certainly should not be connected to the road network so as to avoid directing unauthorized traffic onto taxiways. I don't think there is much navigational benefit while operating an aircraft; if you're at an airport large enough that you need a map of the taxiways, you should have a formal airport chart available.

A lot of airports in the US are already mapped in Waze. I agree that this question needs to be decided and the decision documented in the wiki to prevent regional inconsistency and wasted time on edits that are subsequently deleted.
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