Well, would it been a bad idea to map the drive-thru as a private road to prevent Waze from routing someone thru it. If someone wants drive-thru once they reach the establishment they are likely to see where it is looking out their windows.

OK, I was thinking of work a around to get the navigation to not really use drive-thrus. I would not consider a drive-thru a parking lot road, while it is in a parking lot its purpose is different since you don't plan to exit the vehicle and plan to make a purchase by going through there. Maybe add a toll road to the parking lot road that is drive thru.

There is a POI (Points of Interest) feature that will be coming at some point. That will allow adding things like fast food so that you can easily search for them. You can search already, but the results come from 3rd party search engines and may or may not be accurate. The results of the search when Waze adds POI's and the results from 3rd parties now if they are accurate should take you to the fast food location. If the drive-thru is mapped, it is likely that you will get routed into the drive-thru automatically. That will vary, however, depending on where the 3rd party's GPS point is. If the point is closer to the street than to the mapped drive-thru, it will not route you into the drive-thru. Once internal addressing from Waze is completed and working the way we want it to, we should be able to add a stop point on the drive-thru and that would get you into the drive-thru regardless where the POI point is located.

All that to say, there isn't any real need to add a special piece of data to say that it's a drive-thru because the planned features will handle that automatically. And even now, it will work in most cases if the drive-thru is mapped. Note that you shouldn't necessarily run around mapping every drive-thru if it's not causing problems being unmapped. That could vary from state to state or country to country, however.

Drive-thrus should be mapped as parking lot roads if they are mapped at all. Private roads aren't for use in parking lots or drive-thrus (which are really just a parking lot anyhow).

Parking Lot Roads are not used for navigation unless that's your start or end of the trip or a waypoint. The only other time would be if it's significantly faster - enough to outweigh the penalty for using it - than the real road. That is very unlikely and any road type will function that same way if it's enough faster to outweigh the penalty. Whether or not the penalty for parking lot roads is the same or different from private roads, I don't know. However, that is what we are told to use and it makes more sense. Private roads are roads that are not meant to be driven on by the general public. A drive-thru is open to everyone. And while the actual drive-thru may not be parking, you do not map a parking lot and a drive-thru separately. It's a single route and whether you are just parking to go inside and then leaving afterwards or if you're using the actual drive-thru, you're going to be using the same mapped road.