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Post by Nagamasa
Do we have any guidance on interchanges where roads with their own exit numbers intersect?
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Post by Nagamasa
sketch wrote:
Nagamasa wrote:Do we have any guidance on interchanges where roads with their own exit numbers intersect?
In the past I had done something like this, with two directly adjacent (perhaps slightly overlapping) places.
https://i.imgur.com/t3qi0H6l.jpg
Do you have a more generic example, say for a stack interchange? :) Would be great if we had some reference templates to standard interchange designs.
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Post by Nagamasa
In your experience, at what zoom level do they typically show up? At regular freeway driving speeds? Only when zoomed into for the exit maneuver?
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Post by Nagamasa
This should also be mentioned, if not a part of, Junction Style Guide/Interchange, and as kentsmith9 said, an adoption table on that page, and then a blurb on each state/region on that it doesn't follow this guidance.

I would refrain from calling it "controversial"--WoP is not a news article--just say if your state uses it or not.
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Post by sketch
I used to do this years ago around Louisiana but decided to delete them all one day, as it had failed to gain traction nationally. I could potentially support it again. I do think it's nice to show exit numbers in the display. To me, exit number display in the app is the sole reason to do this.

Though I think it'd be better if Waze were to allow us to do it without having to throw a big area place over everything like that. It's somewhat hackish and inelegant, though it does look pretty okay most of the time (especially in rural and suburban areas).

Regarding your proposal, good first draft. The name doesn't quite work. Properly, I think (if implemented) this should likely be a section in the Junction Style Guide/Interchanges, and linked from wherever the Junction/Interchange category is linked on the Places page.

As for the content, I think more detail is needed regarding the handling of suffixed exits and more urban situations. I've only seen N/S in New York; other states may do this, but at any rate, many use A/B when different ramps feed different directions, so the examples should more clearly state this with sample screenshots as well. Also, naming should follow signs in such situations. If there is a sign that says "Exit 13", then later signs say "Exit 13A" and "Exit 13B", then the Place should be "Exit 13". But if the first sign says "Exit 13B-A" (presumably "Exit 13A-B" coming the other way), the Place should be named "Exit 13A-B".

However, not all A/B exits are actually the same interchange, so the draft should also account for this with examples. The various exits 235 and 236 on I-10 in New Orleans are mostly separate from each other some kind of way, and these should have separate places, of course. It may seem intuitive, sure, but I guarantee someone will come on by and say "well the wiki says A-B-C exits should just be 'Exit 235'..."

Moving on, I am a little puzzled by this:
The street the exit terminates at should not be included in the name unless it alleviates confusion or no numbering system is in place (ie “Exit 449 - 72nd Street”).
I don't think there is really any occasion where this is appropriate. Your example shows an exit number, so a numbering system is in place. Either the exit is numbered or it isn't. If it isn't numbered, there's no reason to put an area place there.
Nagamasa wrote:Do we have any guidance on interchanges where roads with their own exit numbers intersect?
In the past I had done something like this, with two directly adjacent (perhaps slightly overlapping) places.
https://i.imgur.com/t3qi0H6l.jpg
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Post by sketch
The way you're talking about them, it doesn't much sound like any screenshot is going to change your mind, but here I go anyway.

The proposition that the small amount of information proposed to be added to a display that is already quite sparse with textual information (Waze shows far fewer street names on the map while driving than its competitors) is exceedingly dangerous is frankly a tad preposterous.

Someone who is glancing at their app display is there looking for something. Most likely, they're looking for their ETA, or for the next turn and distance, in which case they already know exactly where to look and the rest of the display doesn't really matter. If they're looking at the map, it's probably at the route line, to see where they're going. Other than that, most likely they're looking at reports and traffic ahead. How to judge where those reports and traffic are relative to their position? Relative distance (but that's always changing with speed and zoom level), and by reference to other map objects.

With visible exit numbers, instead of looking at the roads' geometry and going through the cognitive steps of recalling which roads match which geometry (e.g., "Is that relatively thick line up there where the traffic starts Clearview or Causeway?"), all the driver has to do is see the exit number next to the point where the traffic starts, and they know without having to think about it. They can then spend that cognitive energy on the task of driving.

And that's while driving. When panning around the map, the app assumes you are doing that because you are looking for more detail, at which point detail is what you want and expect.

Frankly, the behavior of Junction/Interchange type places as well as Bridge and Gas Station exhibited in the following photos leads me to believe that this is exactly the type of use case the Waze product designers had in mind when creating those place types. It does appear that they make a point to display themselves on the screen when other place types do not.

You'll have to excuse the age of my photos, as I deleted my local freeway exit area places a couple years ago in the spirit of national unity (at the time, no one else was supporting or using them as far as I knew). Also please excuse the map editors color scheme on one or two of them. As a self-respecting app beta tester and UI enthusiast, I don't know what I was thinking.

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December 2015

https://i.imgur.com/usGX31Ll.png
September 2016

https://i.imgur.com/rHTPFxQl.png
January 2017

https://i.imgur.com/oONpzJUl.jpg
February 2016 – not navigating, browsing map
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Post by sketch
What "impairment" are we "risking" here exactly? Wazers aren't reading every single piece of text that comes up on their screen. The text labels on the screen are there for reference, to enhance situational and positional awareness.
DwarfLord wrote:In the screenshots, it's useful to see how in the first three the reduced level of detail in drive mode helps the exit numbers to stand out at least a bit more than in non-drive browsing mode, and thanks for that. To the point of demonstrating net positive -- can you help me understand how the Exit numbers in those specific examples helped you get where you were going in ways the other display cues did not?
I cannot, because the exit numbers are not the reason I took those screenshots. The first is a classic "Waze win". The second, I'm not really sure why I took, perhaps to investigate why the two cemeteries were mapped with different road types. The third was out of excitement for the "Frank Davis 'Naturally N'awlins' Memorial Bridge" label showing up in the client. The last, I'm not sure of either—possibly because the US-90 BUS E label is extending pretty far past the end of US-90 BUS.

But we don't take too many screenshots when things are working properly, do we? Apart from Waze wins and amusing bridge names, at least?

It is not that hard to imagine a screenshot similar to my #WazeWin with clear traffic shown on map, but where my destination is further to the east and the quickest route is to sit out the traffic. If the red traffic line ahead of me ends just before the "Exit 226" legend, I know when it's going to clear up without having to study the road layout to determine just what that intersecting road is.

Another scenario: I am on a road trip. I need gas. My car says I have 5 miles until empty, and I know it's probably less than that because I'm going uphill in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains just over the Kentucky state line from Tennessee (obviously, not based on a real example :? ). I know I'm at mile 3 on northbound I-65 by the mile markers, so I "ask my passenger to" scroll the map forward to see if there are any gas stations ahead. Lo, there are! But where? Whew, Exit 6, it says so right there on the map. Good thing I had those freeway exit number area places. (In reality, there were no such places on the map during this trip, and it was much more nerve-wracking.)

It is also worth noting that the relative novelty of exit numbering to Californians may tend to skew a Californian's judgment one way or the other. Whereas any New Jerseyan can tell you which exit off which turnpike they live nearest. The rest of the country lives somewhere in the middle of that.
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Post by sketch
DwarfLord wrote:Here's what I'm hearing:

1. Since there are already Area Place names floating on the display, then it should be OK to add more with no additional effect on cognitive or visual impairment. Either there's no impairment in the first place, or the impairment is already at maximum, either way there is zero downside to adding more detail.

2. Since nobody has complained about the potential for the names of even widely-disliked Area Places to cause impairment, therefore there is no impairment, thus there is zero downside to adding more detail.

With a world of respect for the authors, I'm afraid I don't follow the logic on either of those.

All I can say is that, in my own personal experience, I have caught glimpses of text on the Waze display out of the corner of my eye and wondered enough if they were meaningful to my drive that I looked more carefully even though it meant a certain level of impairment. I can't possibly be the only Wazer in the world to whom that could happen.
Your analysis seems to rely on the assumption that an ideal navigational map display would contain no text whatsoever.

Which is fine, I guess, if your only goal is to reduce any potential for driver distraction whatsoever.

But that's not what a navigational map is for. The entire purpose of the map (or road signs, for that matter) is to enable and promote situational awareness.

Are situational awareness and driver distraction mutually exclusive? Inversely proportional? That's a very simple way to think about it, and also a very wrong way. Your speedometer and fuel gauge contribute to driver distraction by taking your eyes off the road, yes. But they also increase your situational awareness, to a high enough extent that the "distraction" they cause is justifiable. And still, that's a simple view.

As with most things, a more holistic analysis paints a more comprehensive picture. The moment you spend glancing at the speedometer means that you don't need to worry about how fast you are going, so you don't have to (1) spend mental energy wondering, (2) scan the horizon and other traffic intently for cops, or (3) calculate your speed using your tachometer (if equipped), current gear (if you know it), and final drive ratio. The moment you spend glancing at the fuel gauge means you don't need to constantly refer to your odometer, recall the last mileage at which you refueled, and then calculate your expected range based on your average fuel economy and driving style.

A simple view of driver distraction vis-à-vis satellite navigation maps would say that the map is just another thing to take the eyes from the road. But how well is someone really driving if they have no idea where they are? Being lost is its own distraction. External cognitive effort (trying to determine your location) distracts from the task at hand (operating a motor vehicle).

And that's why GPS maps have text on them. And why they have landmarks, like parks, schools, and bodies of water. Situational awareness. Better situational awareness means less effort spent worrying about your situation and more effort spent driving.

An exit number sitting above an upcoming interchange increases the driver's situational awareness by telling that driver exactly which exit is in exactly that place on the map. Placing that little extra morsel of information on the route means a driver can glance, read, understand that little bit more quickly than if they'd just seen a purple route line going off into the distance. So the somewhat-familiar driver no longer has to think about "hm, that traffic line is starting just after that exit, but which exit is it?" Maybe with a little thought she could have looked at the surrounding map and figured out it was the 23rd Street interchange, which is Exit 44B. But what could she have done with the mental effort spent on that if she had simply read "Exit 44B" on the screen, without having to think about it? Operate the motor vehicle a little bit more carefully.

If it's not that "all text is bad", then I guess your analysis relies on the assumption that a driver will not look at a navigation map unless there is text on it, and then will only look at text and not the map itself, which is just not true. I don't think it takes a human behavior study to know better than that.

You can't follow logic that isn't there.
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Post by tonestertm
Sorry, but I personally have to violently disagree with this practice. The more words that are put on the screen, the more time eyes have to spend there to read them. Studies are already showing that the impact of distracted driving (which includes any activity that takes a driver's eyes off the road, and particularly tasks that involve reading text) is increasing crash (and death) rates. In this case, trying to make out tiny text on the map only makes it worse and more dangerous than looking away from the road in the first place, and since the time when this addition might be of use is while driving... bad idea.
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Post by tonestertm
Regarding long names on exit segments: there is also a significant difference between the wording in larger font and fairly high contrast at the top of the screen and the small font in relatively low contrast on the map. However, too many words in a prompt is a good jumping off point for a completely different discussion :D It's also important to realize that some wazers drive with the screen off, only using audio prompts, and some wazers drive with sound off, only using the visual prompts. We should do our best to accommodate both cases and the combination thereof, without introducing too much information.

In addition, in the example image in the OP, I'm having trouble with the extra words amongst what I personally consider to be the more valuable information of the gas station names. Perhaps if I were used to the practice, I'd know that I could just ignore those and focus on what I'm actually looking for, if I'm going to actually attempt to read something on the map. Most often, I find gas station names to be most useful after I've already left the freeway and am stopped at a light or stop sign. I'll also side-mention that I think 3 or 4 words per gas station is too many, in most cases, but that battle was lost to an extremely minimal-use-case argument some time ago.

I'd like to make a point that 8 characters or 20 makes little difference: eyes still have to find the text, focus on it, read it, and then return to the road and re-focus again, while digesting the info. The reading part is actually a relatively minimal percentage of the time involved in that process. Symbols and shapes are processed much more quickly by the brain than words.

I will admit, I can see the attraction to the naming idea. And I've been in this rodeo long enough to know that I'm not likely to change the opinions of those regions already using the process. So I fully support the OP's suggestion to standardize the usage in those regions who will be using it. Once drivers are used to the format, it will minimize the time eyes spend away from the road. However, I still feel that mapping should endeavor to minimize visual distraction while driving.
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