Hi Ross,

rossjamccarthy wrote:Hi all. Fairly new to map editing in Waze but as I drive a PHEV I'd love the opportunity to start adding EV charging points. Has anyone attempted this already? The app itself seems to only allow petrol/diesel selection too. Is there any option to add Electric or anything in the pipeline? As I said, I'm happy to do the donkey work but if I can get all chargers in a CSV or the likes for import, let me know.

WME does have a "charging station" Place type, so they can certainly be added by hand.

However, there's no obvious way of searching for them in the app, but if they're given the name "charging station" (or contain them as part of the name) then they do show up if you search for "charging station".

Now, I think the ESB does maintain a list of all public charging stations in the country, so it would probably be possible to get that list from them. If it had coordinates too, then there *might* be a way of importing them into the Waze map. I don't think anybody has done that in Ireland, but we might be able to get help from the folks in the UK. The only tricky thing would be updating the list as new stations are added and old stations are removed.

++David \ davidg666

YanisKyr wrote:Hey guys, I have an idea in the back of my head about this actually. Briefly, the idea is to ask for a list of POIs from ESB, and use a tool that Tim (timbones) has developed to help us throw them in WME.

I've never used (or seen) that tool first hand, and it's for any kind of POIs. From my understanding it still requires some manual input but the hard part of finding the location and (I think) of eliminating the existing ones) is taken care of.

@David does it ring a bell, have you seen this maybe?

It sounds very much like the kind of tool Tim almost certainly would have, so it's be worth asking him about it.

I think first we should check what ESB can provide and (most importantly) whether it includes exact latitude and longitude. Vague locations like just street names wouldn't be enough.

Actually, the interactive map they provide here does have exact coordinates. I would hope that the ESB would let us have the raw data...

++David

rossjamccarthy wrote:I'll get onto them and report back, however there are more chargers out there than ESB as many hotels, shopping centers and car parks are adding chargers. Give me a few days and I'll try source a list for Ireland...

Brilliant, thanks! If you can get a list together then we can get on to our UK counterparts and see if they can provide a way to upload them all at once to the Waze map.

We do, of course, need to keep it up to date as new chargers show up up and old ones are taken away. As you're sourcing a list, can you watch out to see that we can get fresh lists regularly?

++David

rossjamccarthy wrote:Quick reply from ESB eCars
[...]
I have imported this KML to an Excel file (attached) and cleaned it up a bit for easy consumption, although if we can link the KML somehow we'd have live status and future updates/upgrades from the network.

Thanks - I'll ask our UK friends if they can do anything with that.

Interesting that it includes charging points in the north too. I wonder if that's comprehensive.

++David

Hi Ross,

rossjamccarthy wrote:Has there been any update on this?
Anything I can do to assist?

Thanks for the reminder. I never got a reply to my original from our UK friends - I imagine it might have got lost over the xmas period. I've just sent a reminder.

Keep watching this space, but feel feel to poke me again if you don't hear anything back...

++David

My apologies: I never got around to updating this thread.

We heard back from our counterparts in the UK, and this is what they said:

They don't bulk-add charging points to the map there, and although Waze HQ *might* be able to bulk-add points for us, it would be important that the location information is very accurate. If it's not that accurate, then we'd end up navigating people to the wrong place all the time, and that might be worse than not having charging points at all!

Another issue is how to best map the points, because (as you know) there are many different types, access restrictions and prices. That's a bit tricky, since Waze itself has no easy way of representing that information. We could probably put this information in the description for each point, but we'd need to agree on a common format so that all editors put in the information in the same way, to make it easy for users to search for what they need.

So we *could* ask Waze HQ about doing a bulk import, but the accuracy of the location is very important, and we'd also need to verify that the source data we have included all the necessary information. If it ends up being like petrol stations though, we'd end up manually mapping every single point, which is obviously time-consuming.

++David \ davidg666

'morning folks,

Turns out our friends in the UK have a tool that might be very useful for importing EV charging points into the Waze map. If the locations posted by the ESB are very accurate, then we can just import them wholesale, but if they're not that precise, we might need to get them verified one at a time by editors.

I had a look at some locations and they were quite close, but some were around 20m off. For some others I couldn't see a charging point at all in Street View (but naturally that doesn't mean they weren't there: the SV images could be out of date, or maybe I didn't/couldn't see the charging point).

Ross (and anybody else): can you check a dozen or so locations in the ESB list and see how close they are to actual EV charging locations? Can you also reply with opinions about what information Waze users need to be able to see in the app? EV charging points would just be another Place in Waze, because Waze doesn't have explicit EV support, so it would be tricky to present connection type, power available and so on (I'm not familiar with what's important to EV drivers looking for a charging point).

++David

Further to this: I should have posted a link to this thread in the UK forum about how venue verification is done there.

Editors in the UK get asked to help with verifying the location of imported places (such as McDonalds fast food places in that thread).

Have a look at the thread for an idea of what we might do for verifying the placement of EV charging points in Ireland.

++David \ davidg666

I am a also very interested in moving this forward as I have an EV too.
Glad to help out if there is anything I can do to move it forward.

Brian.