This is an issue that has cropped up recently in Utah. Currently the consensus among Country Managers in the US is to limit the use of Landmarks to a small subset of the available options. Specifically we want Schools, Gas stations, Parks (and I count Golf courses as Parks), Large mall complexes (Gateway, South Towne etc...), Transit Parking lots (Specifically Trax, Front Runner and official UTA Park and Ride Lots), Cemetaries and critical government facilities landmarked. For the last one this should primarily be Police Depts and Post offices.

We don't want every little shop in every strip mall, or every business, or every parking lot you can find landmarked. There are reasons for this, to avoid cluttering the maps to the point that such landmarks become useless. With the exception of parks all landmarks are painted with the same color, put small ones too close together and they merge together. Further the names of landmarks tend to float around and if multiple landmarks are close together it becomes impossible to determine what the labels are for. Further marking landmarks within a landmark doesn't work because again there is no delineation of the separate landmarks and you get shop names floating around inside a larger landmark. One other landmark that is not needed is any body of water. Water is marked in a map layer that Waze has not given us access to.

Why then, you may ask is there such a large list of landmarks. That list is believed to have been generated automatically when the base map import occurred, it basically pulled the landmark list from the Tiger maps that the basemap import was made from. A request has been made to have Waze staff look at the list and consider trimming it down.

Some of you have probably noticed I've been going through and deleting a lot of unnecessary landmarks, I've also been locking many of the ones we do want, this isn't necessarily to block any of you, but rather it's is a way for me to mark ones I've already looked at and agreed with. I do intend to go through and unlock many if not all of them.

Anyway there are still many many schools out there that need to be landmarked, I'm strongly in favor of landmarking the perimeter of the school grounds not just the building, it's quicker and cleaner.

But most of all what I want to avoid is a mess I happened across recently responding to an unlock request in Southern CA, Next to the segment of freeway being addressed Everything was landmarked, it was a solid mass of overlapping landmarks, which meant that in the client it was a solid grey blob with the many many landmark names floating around with no reference points as to what the names actually referred to. Let's keep landmarks useable by limiting them.

Thanks