Do you think it'd be sufficient to come up with something very simple, like this:

• only map car parks that anybody can use.
• if car parks are restricted to customers of the adjacent business, make sure to mark them as restricted.
• follow Waze general editing guidelines for car parks: create a segment for the car park entrance, but never all rows within the car park.
• consider following UK car park guidelines(?)

(I'm sure this could be expanded on, but something simple might do as a starting point)

++David \ davidg666

YanisKyr wrote:Would you be open to revisit the use of [P], or shall we stick with the UK guideline 100%?

I've never really liked the use of '[P]' but that's my own opinion and if somebody wants to convince me it's a good idea then go ahead

I think putting '[P]' at the end of a car park name (like "Tesco [P]", for example) is redundant, because if the user is told "turn right into Tesco" then that should be quite clear - if they seem themselves turning into a car park right beside a big building that says "Tesco" on the side there's no need for anything else. Same for any other car park that's associated with one big business or a shopping centre/retail park.

Where we might need something is for standalone car parks that are less obvious (although park-and-ride car parks often already contain a "park" in the name) - but I'm not convinced that "...[P]" is the way to go - and I don't think it looks very nice either, to be honest.

++David

YanisKyr wrote:So, I did some testsing. Named both the shop and the parking with the same name (i.e. Airside Shopping Centre, Power City Swords) and the app only shows one name over both places!

From a map de-cluttering point of view, I find this a huge win! What are you thoughts?

So, just looking at WME at these two permalinks: Airside Shopping Centre doesn't have its car park with a map Place mapped and nor does the Power City in Swords. They should probably both have "Parking for customers" checked though. What are the current UK guidelines on mapping of car parks that aren't generally open to the public but are associated with one single business or for a number of businesses in a single location (such as a shopping centre)?

You said above that you "named both the shop and the parking with the same name". To me this wording implies that there are two Places with the same name; now I'm not sure that I understand what you meant!

++David

YanisKyr wrote:

davidg666 wrote:So, just looking at WME at these two permalinks: Airside Shopping Centre doesn't have its car park with a map Place mapped and nor does the Power City in Swords.

Do you not see the car park places in the WME? screenshot 1, screenshot 2.

No - just one place. However, when I looked earlier, the Tesco was a point place and now its an area place, so now its as though updates are taking a while to show up in WME for me - although that's a bit weird if that's the case. I just looked again using the beta version of WME and that doesn't show the Tesco there at all. Something's strange.

Aside: Airside Shopping Centre has the categories "Shopping and services", "Supermarket / grocery", "Coffee shop" and "Pharmacy". To me, a category implies that a place *is* all of those things, not that is *contains* all of those things. Surely if the shopping centre contains all of those things, each of them should have their own place (either a point or an area place, depending on their size)?

YanisKyr wrote:

davidg666 wrote:You said above that you "named both the shop and the parking with the same name". To me this wording implies that there are two Places with the same name; now I'm not sure that I understand what you meant!

Correct, there are 2 places with the same name but the app shows it only once.

OK - that part is good - assuming that that stays the case. However, I notice Live Map is currently showing the label "Airside Shopping Centre" twice, which can't be good.

If WME isn't showing both new places (for both of us) then maybe one of them didn't get included in the most recent tile update. Have you refreshed the map cache on your phone to make sure you've got the latest tile update?

Finally, have you checked the UK car park mapping guidelines? I'm not certain (but I'm open to correction) that we should be mapping car parks that aren't open for the general use of everybody at all. What do you think?

++David

YanisKyr wrote:

davidg666 wrote:Finally, have you checked the UK car park mapping guidelines? I'm not certain (but I'm open to correction) that we should be mapping car parks that aren't open for the general use of everybody at all. What do you think?

Here is the three principles for mapping UK car parks. For our examples:
1) Applicable as they are only regulated for abuse (clamping over x hours);
2) Applicable;
3) Applicable.
Of course, I'm open to discussion/clarifications.

Are you sure the Power City car park (in particular) meets those principles? I can't imagine they'd like people parking there and them going somewhere else for the rest of the day. I don't know the shopping centre there either but, I notice many car parks have signs permitting two hours of parking or only wanting customers of the shopping centre to park there.

In the examples section of the UK page, it says "The Parking-Lot Area Place is always appropriate for: ... General-purpose short-term public parking lots, structures or garages dedicated to parking only and independent of any particular mall, complex, campus, or other final destination." (emphasis mine). I'd also argue that a car park for a particular mall (such as the shopping centre in your example) is not independent of the shopping centre.

++David

YanisKyr wrote:I added the Tesco area place only last night (from a different PC), so I just realised it doesn't appear in my screenshot from earlier either. I have observed that "fresh" places appear and disappear in WME like this more often than not, and that's probably why places are mapped twice within a few days sometimes.

Ahem: I just discovered/realised that WME now has separate layers for car parks and other places - that's why I wasn't seeing the ones you could see.

++David

YanisKyr wrote:I've done some tests for restricted parking places a while ago, and they will show up on the map with the typical parking colour but won't show up on search results, neither have the little blue parking icon when your destination is around them. So I changed these two to Restricted for now.

OK - what about the name for Airside Shopping Centre showing up twice at the moment in Live Map? (only at the maximum zoom level)

See: To be fair, this might be because that layer in Live Map hasn't updated yet - I notice some zoom levels in LM take a while to get updated.

++David

YanisKyr wrote:In all fairness, a fraction of the users use LiveMap. If we decide consider the looks of the map, we should look at the app.

I use it, but I guess I'm in that fraction

Either way, if something looks wrong there, I think most editors would try to fix it. However, that zoom level might not have been updated yet, so we should give it a few days. If it *still* looks wrong there, then maybe we could remove the name from the car park - how does that sound?

++David

YanisKyr wrote:Hmm, un-named completely? To clarify, are you suggesting to follow same approach for all malls/supermarkets/restaurants car parks?

If double names continue to be shown in Live Map, then yes. So long as the destination point for the main place is set to be at the car park entrance, I don't see any downside to this. If we have two things (car park + shop/whatever) then the main destination should be the only thing that shows up in search results. We don't want two identically-named things to show in search results (not sure what the current behaviour is though, so this might not be an issue).

That said, see if Live Map at maximum zoom changes over the next few of days...

++David

YanisKyr wrote:Currently parking places marked as restricted are not showing up in search results. A great future feature would be to tie the restricted car park place to the place it is restricted for!

I'd be inclined just to set the checkbox for "has customer parking" for the actual place and then make its destination point to be the car park entrance; I don't see any need to tie them together. The way I look at mapping restricted car parks is just so that they appear visually on the map.

YanisKyr wrote:Any ideas how to approach bigger car parks (i.e. Blanch or Liffey Valley) that have a colour for name?

I think leave them unnamed - how many users will be thinking "today I want to use the red car park - I like red!" rather than just wanting to navigate to whatever big shop they want or just the shopping centre as a whole? They can use the physical signs in the car park itself to be reminded that today they've parked in the green car park - unless they open Waze to look at the Waze map to see where the red/green/whatever sections are. If you think they should be named, maybe just name them after their names, so just "red", "blue", etc... (I was about to say that it'd then be weird having colour names showing up in search results, but if restricted car parks don't show in search results, then that's not a problem).

Speaking of Blanch, I recently renamed all the road segments I could find from "Blanch SC" to "Blanchardstown Shopping Centre" because "Blanch Ess Sea" sounds a bit daft when the TTS says it.

++David