Monday-Wednesday of this week I went on a 800+ mile road trip (business trip) that I took advantage of once in a while to see how Waze performed and what road standards we might want to consider for NM. I thought some others may have similar ideas, so wanted to share and learn from what you've experienced.

While this could be for any road trip, the Southwest is a bit different in the vast empty nothingness that can exist and the lack of cell data network coverage. I am truly inspired to place a few "middle of nowhere" landmarks in some parts of New Mexico.

My path was Albuquerque to Truth or Consequences to Las Cruces on I-25, then over US-70 across White Sands to Alamagordo, then up the mountains to Cloudcroft, down the other side to Artesia, down to Carlsbad for some business and wandering around the vast openness of a booming oil field area with pumps going everywhere. This had some interesting scenery. Coming back I went north on US-285 to Roswell then across a vast empty flat land from there to Vaughn, and finally to I-40 west to Albuquerque.

General

== There's nothing like a road trip to ferret out weird anomalies that are hard to see while editing, such as an extra road node that makes an errant "turn right" direction where no turn exists.

== For the first time I noticed the client (on an iPad) just blink out and crash or go away a few times. It was like the long trip made it give up and die.

== Rural SW roads need a lot of work. There are many roads in the map that no longer exist and many that are not named correctly.

== I noticed in the client and editor that oil well workers apparently use Waze in seeking wells, perhaps they store locations to return. Navigating in flat land with countless hundreds of square miles of nothing-much and no physical landmarks is disorienting. Waze kept me company and preserved my sanity at times so I wasn't alone.

== I am perplexed by Waze's water layer. I saw some brine lakes that were in the client but not landmarks in the map. In other times I see nothing there when there is water. So, the completeness of the water features in the US is a mystery to me. I have added a lot of water landmarks that do not show originally in the client but probably created some redundant water features. I have also seen water where none exists now.

Data Network Coverage Issues

== When I have no coverage, I cannot report. I guess that makes sense sometime for real-time issues, but why can't Waze collect User Reports, cache them, and send them out later?

== Waze seems to do OK in caching the route through poor network coverage areas. I didn't try to zoom in to see where that caching stopped.

Locally Named Highways

== I think there must be a lot of locally named highways that are named for the towns they are in-between or some old name that has since gone archaic. I found a bunch on my trip. All the road signs used the US-xxx or SR-xxx name of some sort and never referred to a name like "Seven Rivers Highway" that was in the map. I did see that name on old abandoned buildings that were from 30-plus years ago when the name was popular. I am moving all these legacy names into an alternate field and