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[Page updates] Railroads can be junctioned

Post by AlanOfTheBerg
I am still waiting for 100% confirmation from around the globe, but testing in NA over the last several weeks has shown clearly that railroads are not routable and can safely be junctioned to regular roads.

There are several pages I know which need to be updated for this. For example:

https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Road_types/U ... able_roads and https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Road_types/USA#Railroad sections
https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/How_to_class ... )#Railways

and more subpages by country of "Road Types"

https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Best_map_edi ... ging_Roads

As each country confirms in testing that Railroads appear to be "invisible" to the routing engine and Waze always routes to the nearest drivable segment only, please update your pages and inform you community.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
DwarfLord wrote:What would be the motivation to junction a railroad with a regular road? Or is this change simply to prevent (potentially disastrous!) routing in the event an editor accidentally creates such a junction?
Because in reality they do junction with each other. There are regular patterns at rail crossings which may become useful in Waze just like busy stop lights. It's also part of making the map accurate. Even further down the road, it's possible, with train real-time tracking and planning systems, that Waze could know even more precisely when a train will cross any given roadway.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
Poncewattle wrote:* Elevation: Continue to set to -5 or make ground. I assume the latter, except...
* ... set elevation as appropriate for underpasses and overpasses
Elevation should be set to reality. That means if a road at ground and a RR intersect, then the RR should be at ground. Therefore, most RR should be set to ground, except, as you not, for under/overpasses.
Poncewattle wrote:* turn restrictions. Ideally if it's not routable WME shouldn't even present a turn restriction option, but it does. So do we need to make sure we disable all turns into and out of the railroad or doesn't it matter?
Ideally, yes, WME should not display turns at all. Testing has show turns allowed or not makes no difference. I vote for restricted, just for the sake of logic that most cars cannot/should not turn onto a RR.
Poncewattle wrote:Edit: Hmm, if one sets the direction to unknown, the turn restrictions takes care of itself. How about that for a practice?
Yes, that does handle the turns, but in reality they are just hidden by the WME interface. Also Unknown doesn't affect actual routability. If others would vote for Unknown, I'd be ok with that.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
DwarfLord wrote:This raises the question of whether we should change our practice of limiting mapping of railroads to one track per right-of-way (at least, that is my interpretation of the USA Railroad Road Type article that asks us not to map every piece of parallel track, combined with the principle that Waze is not a railfan app and should focus on drivers).

If Waze wants to follow where different trains are going in real time (based on observing traffic slowdowns at sequential grade crossings?) then it may actually want to know about separate rail networks that happen to share a right-of-way at times.
DwarfLord wrote:Great thinking! Yes, track separations can commonly be under 5m (that's the minimum segment length). Crossings of double track involving junctions would not only be more work to maintain, they'd have to be finagled to ensure road segments stayed >= 5m.
I haven't thought deeply about this. My first gut reaction was to combine all tracks at crossings, like a bowtie, but that would be ... bad. But the though of having 3 tracks crossing a road makes my eyes cringe. I'd say we stick to single track crossing for now as we already have. In the future, when the Editor and App get a map facelift, we can revisit also from a UI standpoint.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
How or whether to map a railroad which goes down the middle of a 2-way street for which there is no restriction of turning at any point including into driveways all along the road? That is to say, it's a two-way segment not a pair of 1-ways. But the rail goes down the center. No way to junction > 5m on each cross street. And I'm not sure that "burying" the rail segment directly under the street segment is a good idea.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
banished wrote:My question is because they CAN be junctioned, SHOULD they? The wiki has been stable for a while, and at present I don't see a demonstrable advantage or need to change from the current elevation (-5). Yes, somewhere down the line there may need, but there's nothing driving a change at present, nor is Waze suggesting it.
A rebuttal, as I am in favor of the junctioning:

A "stable" wiki page is not relevant. The wiki changes daily as we learn things.

CBenson proposed the biggest reasons to making a change. Traffic impact being the most important to drivers. Waze has encouraged us to make the map as accurate as possible. Setting RR to -5 and no junctions with roads is not accurate. Nor did Waze ever request that we not junction RR. The community decided that only because they were routable. Originally, we were telling editors to not map RR at all. Then we decided we could by setting at -5, but don't junction because they were routable.

Junctions only impact routing until segment speed data is captured, then the junction "penalty" goes away. Waze doesn't need to have a project to identify RR crossings, because with a junction, the Waze speed capture does the rest automatically. Long delays at that junction will be collected and aggregated by the 10min/30min timeslice with all other stop light and stop sign data.

Another reason I see for allowing of RR junctions is that it is much more intuitive to someone like a newer editor. Right now, rules like "don't junction non-drivable segments" is only found in a few places in the wiki, but is a real core rule for editors. Walking trails are culprits, but more so are railroads. It just simply makes sense to map their junctions with roads, because the actually do junction with the roads.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
PhantomSoul wrote:What if we piloted it in a small area to observe its effects?
That has already been done and is what resulted in this thread. No deleterious effects have been found. I've had junctions with RR for over 3 months.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
I have re-solicited feedback from Waze, asking that they include routing, mapping and real-time experts in the discussion, on whether Waze feels railroads should be junctioned.
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
The official response from Noam and Shirli is:

"I talked to the routing team. Their answer: Railroads are non navigable. As such, they will never be used by the routing server. Also, they are not allowed as a destination, so if selected as such the routing server will look for the nearest navigable segment."

and

"It shouldn't affect routing and will give a real world view of the junctions. So it can't hurt, only help. In short we're for it."
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Post by AlanOfTheBerg
Poncewattle wrote:It'd be nice if WME would just hide the turn arrows for railroad junctions, like it now hides the u-turn selection for dead-ends. I know turn restrictions are not-applicable now but there's just something a bit unsettling about potentially seeing a green turn arrow onto a railroad line, even if it's ignored.
I think this was mentioned before, and it's a decent idea. It has been added as #225 to
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