• Railroad crossing alert: When a railroad crossing is mapped as such in WME, users will receive an alert in the app.
• The component: To make this feature happen, we decided to reuse a component you are already familiar with. The flow in WME is based on the concept of the speed cams, just without the speed field.
• Adding a crossing: Railroad crossings can be added under Road > Railroad crossing and is displayed on a seperate layer. When adding crossings, you need to place alerts on both sides of the crossing pointing both towards the crossing.
• Permissions: For the initial launch we’ve asked for a global L4 lock that can later be configured per country & object.
• Data Imports & verification: To get you started we’ve decided to import data from the Federal Railroad Administration database in the US (database contains 100,000 crossings after we cleaned it up a little bit already).
  
  We imported data also for France and Canada.

• For a very brief testing period (yet to be determined), the alerts will appear as dummy cameras to non-beta users. Only beta users will see the railroad crossing alert. So please only add railroad crossings for testing for now, not for mapping large amounts.
  
  EDIT
• Currently client testing is limited to beta testers.

delilush wrote: How far away should it be placed from the tracks?
In proximity to the tracks. We'll leave the specific guidance for the local communities and we'll learn more about it during testing.

Does the feature belong to high attention zone feature?
Yes, though the implementation is different in this case than suggested in the original idea for the HAZs. As many mentioned, this is a very common issue we receive across the board from our users and partners (more than some other HAZs) so we went ahead to implement it with our existing infrastructure. This does not mean that other HAZ will be implemented in this way as well. Development on other HAZs has not yet started.

How will the data imports work for other countries?
We are not certain about this yet. Meanwhile if you have open datasources we could use for your countries, you can start adding them to this sheet. I can't promise though that imports will happen for all countries, but we'd love to hear where you see good opportunities.

If we add new crossing alerts, are the next round of imports going to create duplicates?
Yes, if you are in the US and are adding a crossing, eventually a duplicate will be imported. This is why we created the guidance to only map for testing purposes for now.

Is the feature designed for all kind of rail crossing (with or without barriers) or for railroad crossing without barriers only?
We will leave this decision to local guidance. Of course different levels of attention are required by drivers depending on the physical safety precautions taken on a junction.

Since this is based on the camera feature, will we need to make a trigger edit for the crossings to go live on the next tile update?
We need to check on that. For now I encourage the alpha group to test it as well.

What was the advantage of implementing the alert this way? In North America, most every railroad crossing is mapped as a junction with road segments. It seems like it would have been far simpler to program Waze to alert if the driver's route is about to pass through a junction node that includes a segment of Railroad type.
In this case, we determined that a mapping solution, controlled by the community, is a better option.

Best,
Daliah