Road Types (USA) - Walking Trails

[DwarfLord]

Well, I'd offer there may still be a couple of reasons to keep them shorter: risk of city smudging should the city field get accidentally set, and increased data loss in event of accidental deletion.


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[DwarfLord]

With the Walking Trail text in place, I realized that the "Non-Drivable Roads" preamble is no longer accurate. I'd like to make the following changes, in italics.

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Non-drivable roads

Your car should not be here!

• As of April 2015 the Waze app is intended only for drivers of motor vehicles, and Waze has no plans ever to support any other application. Using Waze while walking or cycling near drivable roads can damage Waze's speed and traffic database. Editors should not map any road type for the sole purpose of encouraging non-driving Wazers.
• Driving Wazers may find some non-drivable roads displayed on the app useful as points of reference when navigating, such as seeing where a turn is in relation to a railroad crossing or to a major non-vehicle route such as a Rails-to-Trails right-of-way.
• If the GPS Points layer shows frequent improper Wazing on non-vehicle routes near drivable roads, marking these routes with a Pedestrian Boardwalk can be useful to prevent damage to Waze's speed and traffic database for the nearby roads.
• If a base map scan has non-drivable routes on it, it is important these be disconnected and marked with non-drivable road types to prevent traffic routing onto them.
• The Walking Trail road type, although listed as non-drivable, is fully routable and should only be used by experts in very limited cases.
• The non-drivable road types of Pedestrian Boardwalk, Stairway and Runway/Taxiway should not have any type of junction with a drivable road. Because of the way the routing engine uses a penalty system, Waze will route users to drive on these "Non-drivable" road types if they are connected to drivable roads. When crossing a drivable road, the non-drivable road should be bridged across without a junction between them and set at a different Elevation.

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I'm not too sure about that last paragraph, whether it is still necessary not to junction Pedestrian Boardwalks and Stairways. But that's a separate topic from Walking Trails.

Look OK?

[DwarfLord]

OK, here we go. Completely overhauled the article to incorporate the discussion to date.

Very challenging to compress the language to 8th-grade level, and I'm not sure I succeeded, but good practice for someone like me who gets wordy too easily.

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Walking Trails

Surprisingly, the Walking Trail road type is much less useful than it might seem, and should be avoided in most situations.

The WME lists the Walking Trail road type as non-drivable. However, as of May 2015, Walking Trails are fully routable and even support Waze House Numbers. Waze treats them in some ways like "Dirt road / 4X4 Trail" but displays them differently. Historically, editors have disconnected Walking Trails to make sure Waze doesn't route drivers over them. This doesn't always work as desired. If a disconnected Walking Trail comes closer to a destination than any other road, Waze may route drivers to a location nearer to the Walking Trail than to the destination. This problem can be severe for Walking Trails passing close to many destinations in a dense neighborhood. Connected or not, the Walking Trail type should never be used where effects on local routing are not desired.

The name "Walking Trail" suggests that Waze wants to support pedestrians and cyclists. However, as of April 2015, Waze focuses on drivers of motor vehicles and has no plans to encourage or support any other application. In fact, pedestrians and cyclists using the Waze app may damage Waze. By Wazing at speeds different from the traffic, they can create false traffic indications and even influence Waze's records of average road and turn speeds.

Because of this effect, editors should not map Walking Trails, or any other road type, for the sole purpose of encouraging non-driving Wazers. See the descriptions of other non-drivable road types for recommended applications of those types.

If the GPS Points layer shows clearly that pedestrians and cyclists already use Waze on a path or trail that lies parallel to a drivable road, then, as of May 2015, the path may be mapped with a Pedestrian Boardwalk. Doing so will limit the damage these Wazers would otherwise cause to the road's speed data. Such paths should only be mapped once it is clear Wazers regularly use them.

Applications

In rare cases, connected Walking Trails can bring drivers to destinations where otherwise Waze might fail to offer the best route. For example:

• A music pavilion in a large or urban park accessed by a pedestrian path from a distant parking lot.
  
• A train station reachable from either side of the tracks but with no drivable road across them.
  
• A destination addressed on a non-drivable footpath.

A connected Walking Trail may be used to route drivers to such destinations. If the Walking Trail goes through from one drivable road to another, ensure that outgoing turn restrictions are red, or that the roads on both sides are private or parking-lot roads, to disallow through routing via the Walking Trail. Lock the Walking Trail as this is uncommon usage that may puzzle other editors.

Orientation or destination applications involving foot or bicycle paths that do not require routing, such as marking where an obvious bicycle path crosses a road or where a trailhead is located, should not use the Walking Trail type. Use Pedestrian Boardwalks or Point Places as appropriate.

Naming

If destinations are addressed using House Numbers on a Walking Trail, it is essential that the Walking Trail's name and city fields be set accordingly so that routing to the addresses will work. For other routing situations, Walking Trails should be named to alert drivers that they must leave their car. For example, a Walking Trail connecting the two sides of a train station may be named "Station Access Path".

[DwarfLord]

In the non-drivable roads section of the Road Types (USA) wiki, the figure that used to show how walking trails distort routing even when unconnected appears to have been replaced by another figure showing a tiny part of a map somewhere?

[EDIT: The previous figure is back. The above paragraph can be disregarded]

But more to the point, I have been testing that walking-trail routing distortion effect and cannot reproduce it.

If I understand the routing distortion, if a walking trail gets closer to the destination than anything else, one will be routed as close to the walking trail as possible and NOT as close to the destination as possible even if the walking trail is disconnected from the road network. However, while testing in a local situation I could not reproduce this.

The situation involves a parking lot followed by a 5-minute walking path leading to a theme park ("Roaring Camp") railway station. The Google pin is at the railway station, which is generally accepted as the heart of the theme park, not the parking lot some distance away. I have not tried to move the Google pin nor do I think it should be moved in this case.

Sharing a boundary with the theme park is a State Park with good roads. Those roads come much closer to the railway station than the Roaring Camp parking lot road.

• With no walking trail, routing to Roaring Camp takes one into the adjacent State Park.
  
• With a connected walking trail, routing to Roaring Camp takes one to the correct parking lot, but then apparently (according to a UR) one is advised one still has 5 minutes to go. This is in fact quite accurate but it surprised the driver who thought Waze wouldn't and shouldn't think about that.
  
• But if I disconnect the walking trail from the Roaring Camp parking-lot road, leaving a gap of just 10 feet or so, routing again takes the driver to the adjacent State Park.

So, I am leaving the walking trail connected for now because that's how to make routing to Roaring Camp work (without asking Google to move the pin, which I'm not sure I could persuade them to do and don't really want them to do, I like it where it is). Maybe that makes me a WME devil...

[SpencerFG]

I'm waiting to see what the R5 (who is consulting with an RM) does. Removing the house numbers would not be good unless I felt like adding a large number of RPPs. People do want to search for addresses which are on the non drive-able street. Pedestrian Boardwalk might work but the forums are full of discussions of how the routing server treats both of these things. The wiki has no information other than their names.

I'll remain a voyeur on this one for a while.

[DwarfLord]

By the way, if you don't want the path to impact routing, changing it to a Pedestrian Boardwalk would help tremendously. As the Road Types (USA) article says, "Connected or not, the Walking Trail type should never be used where effects on local routing are not desired."


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[t0cableguy]

Permalinks to examples are always appreciated.

Sorry, I should have posted this at the outset. If anyone is still interested . .

https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=usa&lo ... ueFilter=1

I would definitely cut them up where they cross the drivable roads.

You might even want to attach them to the roads but get your regional managment's approval before doing that.

The way they are probably routing now (based on other locations that i've had to modify, and other editors experiences) is to the closest endpoint of the walking trail. which in most cases will be 3 or 4 blocks from the location. At least if you cut the walking trail up into several smaller segments the routing would be to the side street at the end of the block, where there is street parking for that use. It might not get a person into their driveway, (which a RPP would do) but it will get them to the right block.

You can always remove the house numbers as guided before. Which may still be the best option.

[SpencerFG]

Permalinks to examples are always appreciated.

Sorry, I should have posted this at the outset. If anyone is still interested . .

https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=usa&lo ... ueFilter=1

[SpencerFG]

You (even as R2) can try residential place points positioned closer to the streets.

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Thanks. Yes, I use RPPs regularly and, in fact, applied them to the particular addresses in the UR's. These streets will require a large number of them, though, so a more fundamental solution would be nice.

[DwarfLord]

...a several block long walking trail where the desired destination is not actually on the walking trail.

It sounds like the desired destinations are not on nor reached by the walking trail, but for some reason have official addresses on the walking trail. I've seen a few planned communities like that, where the so-called "front door" faces a footpath but all the traffic and visitors and groceries etc. go in and out through the garage and the back door.

If that's the case here, an alternate solution to what you proposed is to remove the HNs altogether and instead use residential Place Points carefully located to ensure routing to the road side rather than the footpath side. Then of course the users have to be alerted to remove all instances of the address from their apps and search again.