sketch wrote:Still not crazy about the "visually obvious" language, exactly. A river that goes under a road, even if it's not visually obvious (i.e., you'd have to intend to look down into a gulch or whatever to see the water), is still worth mapping. You might wonder what that bridge is for.
The problem is that the river/stream feature, implemented as it is using the Area Place, is way easy to overdo. And it shows up on the map with high contrast. So an editor who isn't painstaking will end up creating a Mississippi that every driver within miles will see on their display, when all that's there is a creekbed with a few puddles in it. That's the pitfall the guidance is intended to prevent.
(Yes, this just happened in my area, which is why I got the bit in my teeth! The editor added a tiny creek that hardly anybody ever sees but on the map it shows as one of the biggest rivers in the greater Bay Area. It's just really hard to map tiny creeks with an Area Place.)
If Waze allowed us to map streams with a non-drivable road line, I'd support mapping stream features even where no water is visible to drivers. But doing so with an Area Place is too awkward and risky unless water itself is "visually obvious".
With Sea/Lake/Pond it is (I hope) less controversial that water should be visually obvious to drivers on nearby roads for there to be a bright blue water feature on the map...?
If this is not persuasive, I'd be happy to see alternative language that could prevent the disaster I mentioned above...!