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Railroad Crossing now Enabled!

Post by
Hi Everyone,

We are happy to announce that Railroad Crossing is now Enabled in WME Production.

Some facts on how the feature works:
  • Railroad crossing alert: When a railroad crossing is mapped as such in WME, users will receive an alert in the app.
  • The component: To make this feature happen, we decided to reuse a component you are already familiar with. The flow in WME is based on the concept of the speed cams, just without the speed field.
  • Adding a crossing: Railroad crossings can be added under Road > Railroad crossing and is displayed on a seperate layer. When adding crossings, you need to place alerts on both sides of the crossing pointing both towards the crossing.
  • Permissions: For the initial launch we’ve asked for a global L4 lock that can later be configured per country & object.
  • Data Imports & verification: To get you started we’ve decided to import data from the Federal Railroad Administration database in the US (database contains 100,000 crossings after we cleaned it up a little bit already).

    We imported data also for France and Canada.
You can find some visuals attached.

Some additional things to be mindful of:
  • For a very brief testing period (yet to be determined), the alerts will appear as dummy cameras to non-beta users. Only beta users will see the railroad crossing alert. So please only add railroad crossings for testing for now, not for mapping large amounts.

    EDIT
  • Currently client testing is limited to beta testers.
FAQ from Beta release notes
delilush wrote: How far away should it be placed from the tracks?
In proximity to the tracks. We'll leave the specific guidance for the local communities and we'll learn more about it during testing.

Does the feature belong to high attention zone feature?
Yes, though the implementation is different in this case than suggested in the original idea for the HAZs. As many mentioned, this is a very common issue we receive across the board from our users and partners (more than some other HAZs) so we went ahead to implement it with our existing infrastructure. This does not mean that other HAZ will be implemented in this way as well. Development on other HAZs has not yet started.

How will the data imports work for other countries?
We are not certain about this yet. Meanwhile if you have open datasources we could use for your countries, you can start adding them to this sheet. I can't promise though that imports will happen for all countries, but we'd love to hear where you see good opportunities.

If we add new crossing alerts, are the next round of imports going to create duplicates?
Yes, if you are in the US and are adding a crossing, eventually a duplicate will be imported. This is why we created the guidance to only map for testing purposes for now.

Is the feature designed for all kind of rail crossing (with or without barriers) or for railroad crossing without barriers only?
We will leave this decision to local guidance. Of course different levels of attention are required by drivers depending on the physical safety precautions taken on a junction.

Since this is based on the camera feature, will we need to make a trigger edit for the crossings to go live on the next tile update?
We need to check on that. For now I encourage the alpha group to test it as well.

What was the advantage of implementing the alert this way? In North America, most every railroad crossing is mapped as a junction with road segments. It seems like it would have been far simpler to program Waze to alert if the driver's route is about to pass through a junction node that includes a segment of Railroad type.
In this case, we determined that a mapping solution, controlled by the community, is a better option.

Best,
Daliah

Best,
Ruben

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Last edited by LostInMyMaps on Wed Apr 21, 2021 11:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Remove sticky

Post by 20a2c149e4224732b21dc49597a725f7
To Disable:

Go to Driving Preferences, Alert and reports, Reports, Railroad crossing, and disable there. There is a toggle for On and Off.
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Post by abc1357
Vespucci41 wrote:
Some additional things to be mindful of:
  • For a very brief testing period (yet to be determined), the alerts will appear as dummy cameras to non-beta users. Only beta users will see the railroad crossing alert. So please only add railroad crossings for testing for now, not for mapping large amounts.
  • Currently client testing is limited to a small alpha group. We expect to widen the beta circle next week
This is confusing. Does the alerts show for alpha group only, beta users, or all users?
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Post by alexnrocha
Hi Ruben,

Could you address to the localization team or check if alert in the app was added to the Transifex resources? Here, we see the alert in English only (string not found in Transifex) :(

Language: Portuguese (Brazil)
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Post by arielorellana
I have what may be a very rare situation which might not have been taken into account. I have a crossing UNDER a bridge. It seem that people driving ON the bridge are also getting the alert.

https://www.waze.com/en-US/editor?env=r ... 159&zoom=8

This is what it looks like on the map


And on the ground
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Post by arielorellana
I see. I thought so but wanted to corroborate. Thank you!
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Post by banished
jm6087 wrote:
Paliano wrote:how far should the client receive the alert and what kind of alert and if repeated?
It is approximately 1/2 mile notification. It is a chime and a pop up notice. I think it only shows at one crossing per drive and also won't show up if within 1/2 mile of last notice.
That's been my experience, as well.
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Post by BatmanandRobbins
I am following; trying to get the railroad crossing disabled!
Seriously what is the purpose of this notification? There are already signs on the road and railroad tracks on the display. Having the big popup is annoying and useless!
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Post by baudav
Hello,
the announcement of the alert and its display does not work correctly in France. The alert does not display the distance and announces itself as a 'control zone' and the railroad crossing icon is not displayed on the map. In France speed cameras are no longer announced precisely, but by a zone, so the alert of a level crossing brings more discomfort than safety here. report WAA-0982
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Post by blue201962
For the third time, I have disabled this annoying feature, and yet much like Nosferatu, it keeps coming back to life. It went off again this morning on a rarely used spur that crosses a 25mph zoned street in Small Town USA, where I live.

My issue here is why won't this spawn of Satan stay off? Why is it continually reactivating? Is WAZE upgrading in the background and resetting this loathsome feature?

As was said earlier, this should be an OPT IN, as it is remarkably annoying to local drivers in Small Town USA who know where the tracks are and have the sense God gave a goat to stop if those big red flashy things are going blinky-winky and the large black and white arm bars are lowered to about 40 inches off the ground.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/euWIV34kQ78/hqdefault.jpg
Do you see this? Maybe you should stop.

The "it's worth it if it saves one life" response it so much pablum. If it will save one life, never get out of bed. In fact, you would be better off hiding under the bed. Going outside is dangerous. People die outside. They die inside too! OMG! Whatever shall we do??!! We need to save that one life AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!!!11!!ONE111!!!!

TL;DR - the warning keeps resetting to "ON", how does one drive a stake through the heart of this monster to keep it off?
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Post by blue201962
I have "show on map" and "Alert me while driving" set to off.
I cut it off by going to Settings/Alerts & Reports/Reports/Railroad crossing.
To date, it has re-enabled itself three times.
I use Android.
I know it was reactivated on the morning of July 29, 2020 because that prompted me to come to the forum and see if anyone else was experiencing this reactivation phenomenon. I cannot give you specific dates on the other two times it rose from the dead, but I will be posting here every time it happens going forward.

I do not fiddle with the controls/settings of waze, the exception being when I am driving to a location I have never been to, then all I do is enter the destination address and go. I am not in the settings, except to cut off this railroad business.
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Eschew Obfuscation.