Sketch has put a lot of thought into this and I am in agreement. MEPs, when actually implemented, may have to be revisited which is typical of new concept implementations. Use of Entrance vs. Non-use - Like Driving79 - I prefer shorter unless needed for clarification. May differ by location. Good Show.

Kartografer wrote:Yeah I'm pretty sure the Main box doesn't do anything in the app. I have changed the draft to reflect that. So where are we at on this guidance? Is it good? I added some images with examples in them.

I'm not certain of this part under Limitations:

As of May 2019, entry points cannot be chosen, whether main or alternate, and multiple entry points are not used in the following situations:

Add a stop
Alternate routes (The 2nd or 3rd alternative may lead to a different entry point)
Plan a drive
In the above situations, first entry point to be created (whether or not it is set as the main point) is used for navigation, and its name is not shown. Further development is planned, including a drop-down menu for users to choose to be navigated to a particular entry point of a place.

In my (admittedly limited) testing of alternate routes in particular, a different MEP was chosen from the one originally used in routing. My observation was that if you switched back to the original route, the designated MEP did not toggle back to the original one.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that "multiple entry points do not function correctly in the following situations"?

(Or perhaps the behavior has changed since I last tested and the originally routed MEP does stick in these situations?)

Kartografer wrote:That's fine. This information was provided by Ruben in the release notes, but I have seen the same thing, where alternate routes, at least in RBS, get a different entry point sometimes. How does it look now?

Better. I'm wondering about this phrase, though:

"A different entry point may be used in manually or automatically recalculated alternate routes, but its name is not shown."

I would have that say "....may not be shown." The different entry point HAS been shown in a manual recalculation in my observation (including today). What I saw was when I returned to the other route, the route passes the logical first entry point and continues on to the second, which makes no sense. I suspect the performance may be.... uneven.

In any case, we don't have to get lost in the weeds on this. This suggested tweak would cover it.

Here's a quick stab at guidance:

Location:

• If the Place fronts a parking lot road (including a Parking Lot Area), set the MEP on the PLR. (for PLAs, I should get a turn prompt before arriving at the PLA.)
• MEPs should be on the side of the road where the Place is (for a point place), or where the centroid is (for an area place, including parking lots).
• The 'quality' of the entry points should be appropriately equal:
  • Examples:
  • If a mall place has some parking/stopping area in front of all entrances except one that fronts an arterial, that 'bad' entrance should not be marked
  • Private buildings should only have manned/public entrances with reasonably equal hours opened

Naming:

• When available, use what is available provided by the owner of the place ("Entrance A", "Neighborhood 3", "JCPenny", "Lot A")
• Otherwise, use notable landmarks ("near Macy's"), cardinal directions ("North Entrance"), or roads adjacent to the venue ("123rd St").
• There's no need to repeat the words like "entrance" unless directly labels what it is.
  - YES: "Entrance A", "123rd St", "Blue Lot"; NO: "A", "123rd St entrance", "Blue"

I just want to thank everyone for the hard work on this. The guidance looks really good.

Having waited a week with no objections, I now repost here the post I made in the US Champs forum regarding guidance for multiple entry points.

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As I understand, the feature is currently live in production WME, but only for Beta users on the app side, for now. We can expect this to change fairly soon though. Further, it currently works only for area places.

Client-side, when navigating to a place with multiple entry points, the feature will bring the user to the optimal entrance, based on driving time. This will not always be the entry point geographically nearest to your starting location.

So, without further ado,

The proper application of Multiple Entry Points as the feature exists in Waze today is for places with multiple entrances, all of which are equally useful for general entry into that place.

There is currently no way to (1) select between entry points in the app or to (2) be routed to the "main" entrance with other entrances as options (which would require (1) to work anyway). So our initial usage of this feature should be limited to places with multiple entrances, all of which are equally useful for general entry into that place.

Further corroborated by the release message from Ruben (staff) in the WME Beta forum:

Vespucci41 wrote:DOs & DONTs

Is good to use the Multiple Entry Points for venues like Stadium, Parks, Shopping Centers and venues that have more than one gate/entrance, all of them allowing the driver to reach the general desired destination and the main concern of the driver would be to get to whatever the closest entry point is.

Don’t use the Multiple Entry Points to hack/solve the nested places scenarios. For example airports being the general venue and the different Terminals nested inside the general venue perimeter. Although you can choose to add multiple entry points to the specific terminal venue in case there are.
Another good example of nested place would be big malls that could have nested parking lots and stores within the polygon.

Multiple entry points at doors, gates, or pedestrian entrances

Malls
The quintessential example of this is the traditional American shopping mall. If you are navigating to the mall itself, with the goal to simply "go to the mall", any entrance directly to the shopping mall itself is equally useful.

This should work both with traditional enclosed malls (e.g., Lakeside Shopping Center, Metairie, LA) and with open-air malls that share the traditional layout (e.g., The Mall at Partridge Creek, Sterling Heights, MI). To the former, the entry points are doors; to the latter, the place where a door would be if it were enclosed.

I believe that the best general experience does not include entrances to anchor stores. The malls with which I am familiar all have multiple direct entrances which do not require trudging through the perfume-sample-tinged hell that is a Dillard's or Macy's. Further, there is no accounting for the time it takes to walk through the anchor store.

There can be flexibility here for malls that are perhaps only accessible through anchor stores, or for which there are few or no convenient direct entrances, but I have not found such a mall in my experience.

Transit stations
To the extent that transit stations are mapped with area places, transit stations are perhaps an ideal candidate for multiple entry points. These have defined and often named entrances, and sometimes getting to one or the other can be significantly easier or harder than the rest. Useful for multimodal travel where someone might, for example, get a ride or Lyft to the metro station for the rest of their journey.

Arenas and stadia
The names should be easy on these! Set entry points where people walk into the stadium, or wherever the gates are.

Parks, sometimes
Probably for smaller parks which you can't really drive through, entry points can be placed at the points where footpaths meet the road or parking area, for example.

Future possibilities – point places
Should the feature be expanded to point places, the feature can be expanded to include pretty much any place that fits the generic description—multiple equally-useful entrances to the place itself.

Examples include underground transit stations, office buildings, etc.

Multiple entry points at entrances for vehicles

Parking lots
Parking lots are the obvious example, I believe. Some imported lots already have MEPs, in fact. I'm not even sure it has to be explained very much. Map entry points where you can enter the lot with your car.

Glorified strip malls
Some malls exist which are essentially glorified strip malls, with parking spread throughout, and no entrances to the mall itself, per se. Juban Crossing outside of Denham Springs, LA, is an example of one. This is the only example (besides parking lot area places themselves) where I think it is appropriate to set up multiple entry points at entrances to the parking lot. If someone navigates to Juban Crossing, they should have the ability to be sent to the optimal entrance for where they're coming from, even if they don't know where they want to be going exactly.

Parks, other times
Generally for larger parks which can be entered many ways by car, the various entrances should be mapped, presuming that any vehicle entrance to the park is as good as any other if you simply want to "go to the park". (An example like New Orleans City Park might want its entry points concentrated on the south end, because that's where all the services and such are, even though the park itself is much larger. Someone "going to City Park" would almost certainly be looking for a certain area of City Park, so it would be a disservice to send them to a place that might be 10 minutes' drive away from their intention. Local knowledge is maybe key here)

Other concerns and minutiae

Production app/routing: for now
For the time being, non-beta users are brought to the first place in the list, as I understand. The "main" flag is not functional for anything, as far as I know. So be cognizant when editing.

When not to use
Multiple entry points are not a substitute for parking lot road navigation for places with multiple entrances to the parking lot but only one entrance to the building. PLRs do things that MEPs can't—they account for the differences in time it takes to get from the public road network to the front door.

Even if we get them for point places, I'm not really sure it's necessary to add multiple entry points where there are, say, 2 entrances on the same face of a building. Very common with Walmart and other big box stores.

Naming
To the extent that entrances don't already have formal names, names should be short and descriptive. I believe we have used similar guidance for parking lot names at malls. Sources for names can come from the compass, from the road the entrance faces, from the place the entrance serves directly (e.g., "Food Court"), etc., whichever applies best to the situation. I would use parenthetical "(near _)" for places that are next to the entrance but to which the entrance does not directly lead.

These are the 2 malls I've set up locally:

The Esplanade, Kenner, LA wrote:ENTRY POINTS
East upper level entrance
East lower level entrance
West upper level entrance
Southwest lower level entrance
Northwest lower level entrance

Lakeside Shopping Center, Metairie, LA wrote:ENTRY POINTS
Food Court
Causeway North
Causeway South (near Potterybarn)
Severn South (near PF Chang's)
Veterans

Parking lot entry points can likely be named in the same fashion.

I'm not sure if the word "entrance" should be included or not. Sort of depends on the client implementation. The phase 2 client mockup shown in the WME Beta thread shows "Driving to | Entry [entry point name]", and in the selection list, it has the header "Entries" and then a list of the entry point names alone. It would be better if we could change the "driving to" to "[entry point name] entrance" and the heading to "Entrances", but at any rate, I believe the word "entrance" in the name will be redundant.

Closing "Thoughts?"

Thoughts?

Kartografer wrote:Alright, pretty sure I wikified what sketch posted above. As for the use of "Entrance" in entry point names, I just said it can be used where it makes sense and is not redundant. Phase 1, which is what our guidance is for now (unless phase 2 is coming like really soon rather than Waze soon), does not say "entries" or "entrances" when displaying entry point names, so I would figure that the word "Entrance" is not redundant unless there is a more descriptive word to use like "Door" or "Gate." Also, I added that title case should be used for entry point names, because it looks better and fits with how we name places themselves.

I don't think this is right. Phase 1 doesn't display the name anywhere in the app afaik, and the WME experience should not have any bearing on this decision. Since writing this originally I have come to believe the word "entrance" will be redundant. We shouldn't create double work for ourselves.

We don't really know what "Main" does or is supposed to do, so we can't really address it.

The instructions for adding a point don’t specify to check the main for the first one. Then it would help to say that the new points appear in the center of the AP and should be moved prior to making another that stacks in same location.

I feel that sketch's write-up covers everything at this point. Keep in mind that MEPs may be different when it is 100% implemented and we will have to adjust to it.