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These guidelines are superseded by the Wazeopedia page on Car Parks since 11 Nov 2017.
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Last year, Waze unleashed the "Parking Project" on us. After 5 months, Waze have finally released support for private/restricted car parks. With this originally missing, we were forced to issue guidelines to delete/not map such car parks. As a result, many will have been deleted. Now they can be properly mapped.

Examples and more detailed explanations are hidden behind the Show buttons.

Which car parks to map

• If there is a distinctly-marked area where cars can park, separated from the road and with it's own driveable segments, it should be mapped.
• If the car parking spaces are accessed directly from the road, this is on-street parking and should not be mapped, whether or not there are car park signs. On-street parking will be a future phase of the Parking Project.

How to map them

• All mapped car parks must be areas. Because of how the Parking Project is supposed to work with the client, Waze needs to be able to "capture" the event of a driver entering a car park, and that won't work with point places.
• Parking Lot Road segments should be added, but only the minimal amount as detailed in the Wiki here and here.
• Mark the car park as Public, Restricted or Private. This is important, as Waze will soon stop offering Restricted and Private car parks to app users when nearing a destination.
  • If you can park there and when go where you please, use Public. Where a car park is associated with several business (eg a retail park) use your best judgement. Some have signs indicating you should only park there for the associated business. But if you can park there and then "go around the corner", then they can be Public.
  • If the car park is for public use with restrictions on it (eg customers/visitors only), it should be Restricted.
  • Private is for car parks where only a specified group can use it (eg staff parking, delivery vehicles). In other words, only drivers with specific permission can park there.
• The navigation point should be correctly set at the entrance to the car park.
  This should be on the start of the first segment of the car park - ie NOT on the road outside. In this way, Waze will direct you to the car park, including any last turn into the entrance. Then it will announce you have arrived, shut up & let you find somewhere to park.
• The car park should have a meaningful name and must include the text that indicates it is a car park: e.g. " Westgate Car Park", "Oxford Park & Ride".
  This is because car parks will show up in the client search along with other places. If they are named for a venue or location, without "car park", users will not know which result is the venue and which is the car park.
• Leave the "operator" field blank.
  The "operator" field is unclear. Waze asked for lists of operators, but there are so many that such a list could never be comprehensive - and an nearly comprehensive list would be too long to find anything in. Imported car parks appear to show an operator name in the app when searching for parking near a destination, but right now the dropdown is empty, so we CAN'T fill it in.
• "Cost" should be set to "free" for free car parks. For all paid car parks, leave it blank.
  The cost field is a real problem. With only a choice of low/moderate/expensive, there's no way to determine an objective value and a subjective judgement can only be achieved with extensive comparison with all local variations. At this time, our advice is to leave this field blank for all paid car parks.
• All the other fields are fairly obvious and should be filled out wherever possible - especially linking to Google places and street names.
• Whilst mapping/updating a car park, please take the time to review and create/update any associated places (eg the business to which a car park belongs).
• If you encounter any car park edited by a user whose name begins with ign_, please review it carefully.
  IGN editors are low-paid editors working for Waze. Their editing quality is generally appalling, but Waze draft them in wherever they think there is a backlog of work. Any place edited by IGN is likely to have serious mistakes - and they've certainly been messing with car parks in the UK.

Imported places

• Any imported private car parks that haven't already been deleted can now be dealt with.
• Some imported points are nothing more than on-street parking with a Pay & Display meter. These should be deleted and the MP marked "not identified".
• If the car park should be mapped and the point is not a duplicate of an existing car park, convert it to an area and map it as above. Close the MP as "solved".
• If the imported point duplicates an existing Waze place, make sure any useful information is copied to the existing Waze place. Then delete the import and close the MP as "solved".
• If you notice any issues with the imported car parks, please submit them to Waze via this form.

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Waze have told us that, "in a few weeks", they will set the Public/Restricted/Private property to Public for any car park where it has not been set. We are asking for the generation of Map Problems for all car parks where the value is not set - this will help us make sure this important value is set correctly.

There may be further changes to these guidelines as the Parking Project progresses, but we are not expecting any more changes soon. Some of the likely changes in the future are:

• Multiple entry points.
• Linking of car parks to existing Waze places.
• There was briefly an option to enter actual costs. We don't know if that will return, or if it will be flexible enough to be used sensibly.