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How I got into Map Editing

Post by a2bpdq
Started Waze: 20th September 2017

Sunday 24th September, on the return leg of my first long journey, Waze led me into the back of a nightmare traffic jam on the M4 that was caused by a scheduled weekend closure (not marked on the Waze map). The diabolical jam was reported by multiple Wazers and yet I appeared to have been routed directly into it. It was a 45 minute queue, with the background sounds of advanced engines continually and automatically starting and stopping. Many other Wazers were in the queue, a colourful line of funky, smiling dots, so they might have been led into the trap as I was.

To be fair, Waze knew there was a traffic problem and had estimated a 10 minute delay, which was acceptable for the first 10 minutes of queuing. But Waze did not know about the closure, despite it having been closed for the past 40 hours already, so Waze could not have hoped to navigate around it.

Finally I got off the M4 with everyone else and into more queues along the official diversion route. I wanted to use the road closed feature to report the M4 closure, so that meant stopping in a parking place. It was very difficult to mark the closure, requiring arrows to be pressed which were all about the off-ramp and not relating to the all-important on-ramp at all, ugh! So I cancelled that report. I decided for the good of all I would go back to the M4 roundabout and mark the closure again.

I programmed a route into Waze to go back to the roundabout and Waze took me down a side street and tried to send me the wrong way up a one-way street. So I did a U-turn*, parked and recorded that problem too. Finally I went back to the M4 roundabout, pressed the closure button in exactly the right spot and I was then able to stop somewhere and get the correct arrows up to click on and mark the on-ramp as closed.

When I got home I started checking to see how these problems were being resolved and so I ended up becoming a map editor.

* A U-turn in the dictionary sense, not in the literal sense. It was actually a 7-point turn where I reversed and parked at point 6
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Post by NorfolkMustard
Welcome, good to have you on board ;)
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