Road Types (USA) – comprehensive overhaul of drivable roads

[txemt]

CR-xx = Primary Street

[txemt]

What about the dirt roads that cross cross the vast open areas of west Texas? They cut through ranches, farms, get people to the oil platforms, as well as to the beaches on the Gulf? What about those dirt roads?

[txemt]

Then the style/best practice for this should also clearly state that any MPs which arise as a result should be closed "not identified", just to be clear that we aren't going to let an MP tell us what to do.

No, don't ever close an MP as "not identified." IGNs get involved then.

[txemt]

I've seen them editing in various places, specifically places. I found a few segments (random) in dfw from December 2014, so they're still editing.

[txemt]

They've mostly been doing places. The few random segments I've seen, I don't remember the circumstances of said segments (lock level, road type, etc).

[txemt]

R11-50 Emergency and Auth Veh Only.gif

This sign makes it illegal to cross, so why mark them?

(5.55 KiB) Downloaded 669 times

[txemt]

Tx, we're talking about the ones not marked like that.

Even if there is no sign posted, it's still illegal.

As far as the sketch's comments, on US highways throughout Texas, there are crossovers which are legal to cross, but on any interstates it's illegal, no matter if it's posted or not.

[txemt]

Consider that as you travel across individual segments of the same type waze does not apply penalties.
In the example above the "correct" crossovers incur a penalty when crossing the divided road,
while the "incorrect" crossovers do not incur a penalty. The incorrect versions actually encourage the routing engine to route across the divided road into the other parking lot instead of immediately turning onto the divided road. Please keep this in mind when mapping these types of roadways to prevent bad routing.

A picture is worth 1000 words. Maybe visual examples would be best applied here.

i'm not sure we want to get too far into best mapping practices though.

It doesn't even have to be a split road.

[vectorspace]

Hi everyone. Darn, blink and there are 8 Forum pages on an interesting topic...

I have two comments on this to start, after I say that the page looks very nice. Well done.

RAMPS

I think that section could use a bit more exception explanation for what is allowable for a RAMP. As I came to learn it, ramps are useful because they don't display text on the client so you can put more complex information that appears on signs, often instructional for navigation.

I think all the exceptions I have seen fall under "Freeway-style ramps onto, or off of, Highways" which are allowable for ramps in the current article...but maybe not. If there are two at-grade highways that intersect with various exit names that are complex or informational, we would need a ramp to express those in TTS. In such cases, I would like to see a RAMP used.

Although I have never done this, I could imagine very complex lane instructions occurring at entrances to civic centers, convention centers, theme parks, etc., where a RAMP might be useful to convey information you don't want displayed on a client. In such cases, we might want to consider their use.

DIRT ROADS

I have been doing a lot of research on dirt roads. There are four types: US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Park Service, and Indian Reservation Roads. The most developed is for USFS that is located here:

https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Forest_Service_Roads

Links to the others are on the bottom pages.

Although there is wise desire to adjust the road types to the Avoid Dirt Roads function in the client, I think we cannot do that everywhere. Things are different in the western half and rural sections of the US where most of the Indian Reservations and Bureau of Land Management roads are located. Waze could really do better, as seen elsewhere in the Forum, by adding additional features around this topic in roads that are dirt but passable by low-clearance (highway type) vehicles.

I would like to see some careful discretion allowed on dirt road types. The hard part about making standards is that some things are not standard.

In addition, once some consensus is reached on this topic. We can decide how to change (or leave the same) the guidance suggested in these pages to make it consistent or exception-based from the guidance in this Road Types (USA) page.

[vectorspace]

...You have to think beyond the functional class in this instance and take into consideration the physical characteristic of the road. There is no point in having an avoid dirt road feature if we go about calling them primary streets or highways because that is how the local transportation department classified them....

What really needs to be done is Waze needs to provide a separate "unpaved" checkbox, similar to that of toll roads. ...

Perhaps we can bring this up at the Meetup. I don't see a lot of value debating this when we're mostly debating what to do in a constrained environment that doesn't let us easily handle the difference between well-maintained, low-clearance vehicle worthy, dirt roads and dirt roads that high-clearance 4x4 vehicles can only travel.

In the current situation, it seems to me that "Dirt Road / 4x4 Trail" mostly speaks to the 4x4 nature of the pathway. If that makes sense, then it seems that "street" must also include dirt roads that are well-maintained. But... even that doesn't handle all parts of the country because the condition of dirt roads can change dramatically with weather and maintenance during weather (such as in winter). Therefore you might want to keep the definition vague and one that can be interpreted locally until we can get Waze to add better differentiation here.