voludu2 wrote:See: viewtopic.php?f=276&t=89309&p=1055650#p1055650

The most important point is to use the code as wrtten on the runway or the FAA airport diagram./ Understanding the meaning of the codes is secondary -- that information should be available from a reliable source.

Who will make the change? The wiki article section appears unchanged so far.

I don't have strong feelings about this, except that I'd urge the text allow a generic default for those who really don't want to be bothered to find the FAA's (or equivalent foreign organization's) airport diagram.

This would provide symmetry with railroads, where we say "Railroad' is the default (unless you really want to research the owner of the track and take responsibility for changing it should the owner change names).

So, I'd suggest the revision provide a default name for any runway of "Runway".

voludu2 wrote:Any editor interested in naming runways is probably interested in finding out what they are called...Is "Runway" better than no name at all? Or are both "Runway" and none acceptable?
If there is agreement in that final point, I'll hit the edit link and start typing.

A major rationale for naming railroads as Railroads was that, if and when they display on the app, it must be clear to drivers that they're not roads. Railroads did indeed display on the app for awhile, and just as we both feared and predicted, they looked just like roads during that brief period.

The possibility of confusion between drivable roads and runways seems small, and I certainly wouldn't be as worried about it, but the concern might not be zero. I don't think the wiki should provide the explicit option of leaving runways unnamed, for that reason.

As to what to call them, Waze is always supposed to present information from the perspective of what is most useful to a driver. To be honest, I suspect the simple word "Runway" is going get through to the average driver better than the more elaborate nomenclature from the FAA chart. So I do believe the word "Runway" should be the required minimum default, with the FAA information optional.

Though I hesitate to wade into the slash-vs-hyphen discussion I did check the FAA's Notice To Airmen portal. After entering KSFO for the NOTAM retrieval and clicking "View NOTAMs", up came a list with many entries along the lines of:

!SFO 03/066 (KSFO A0493/15) SFO RWY 10R/28L CLSD 1503172230-1503172330

It would appear that while hyphens are used on the taxiway signs, slashes are used in the reference documentation, at least in the NOTAM documentation.

Since the Waze segment names will not be used for navigation by airmen (let's hope!) but rather just as reference, I'd be inclined to use the reference convention rather than the taxiway-marking convention.

The argument for the hyphen sounds like fine logic to me.

Thinking further...another argument in favor of the hyphen is that it's more compatible with the existing guidance, which uses the hyphen.

This specific case is an epsilon away from "who cares" and as qwaletee points out borders on pedantry. But as a matter of principle, cosmetic shifts in guidance are best avoided unless absolutely justified. The last thing we want is for guidance to be perceived as capricious. Even guidance as minor as this. If minor guidance gets a bad rap it still reflects on the whole wiki.

So, after more thought, I'm increasingly in favor of the hyphen here.

If the display will render runways in a manner impossible to confuse with drivable roads then I'd happily withdraw that concern.

However, there's a remaining tradeoff, one that I've struggled with the whole time I've been a Waze editor. That is the tradeoff between doing what's best for the driver and allowing editors to indulge themselves.

This tradeoff is nowhere more clear (to me, anyway) than it is with Walking Trails. The Walking Trail has its uses, but they are few, and there seems general agreement that most are unnecessary at best and potentially harmful to the driver's experience at worst. But there seems little support for removing them once created, and in fact it's not uncommon practice to lock them highly to prevent removal.

Personally I'd like to see Walking Trails removed in urbanized areas that are already congested with drivable roads (except where necessary for driver routing), and used sparingly if at all in hiking country rather than marking every little footpath going this way or that. But apparently the editing community has decided to pick its battles and that isn't one of them.

Which brings us back to runways. Call me a worrywart, but I bet that any runway without a name is going to get one sooner or later. Even if locked. It's possible (though probably unlikely) that someone will add new runway segments on top of the locked ones, and give those a name. Giving runways a name from the beginning gets out in front of these editors and at least ensures the name given follows some kind of a standard (e.g. deliberately omitting the FAA airport code so as not to corrupt searches).

So while I definitely appreciate the argument in favor of leaving them unnamed, and am personally OK with that if there's no chance of confusion, it does seem to me that the realpolitik of the situation suggests otherwise. For better or worse.

Oh, a stairway here or there -- shrug. And hey if there are actually destinations on it well that's a horse of an entirely different color.

What I just haven't been able to get my head around are the Walking Trails like those I just posted over in the Incorrect edits thread. I get the sense the community has given up trying to remove these because they always come back, so instead we accept the possible damage to drivers' experience in favor of indulging editors who don't read or respect guidance. I can understand the realpolitik of that approach (oooh, I get to use that word twice in two days!) but that doesn't mean I'm gonna like it.

The "Private Installations" wiki article as of this writing has a section on "air-side roads". While you're talking about an "outer layer" for general operations, and not the "inner layer" for direct tarmac access, the concerns raised in this section may still apply. To summarize them,

• Airports get a LOT of Wazing public traffic;
• That traffic travels in tight proximity to the restricted areas; and
• The Wazing traffic in the restricted areas will be almost nonexistent compared to the public traffic.

As a result, the risk of undesired routing may be unacceptably high in this situation.

Because of that risk, I don't know that anyone unfamiliar with that airport can support the idea of mapping the "outer layer" of the airport's restricted area on principle.

However, maybe the specific circumstances (geometry, traffic patterns) are such that the risks don't really come into play? Perhaps the best way forward is to propose this to your local team (Area Manager, State Manager, RC?) to evaluate it as a specific case.

On a different topic, I see the Road Types (USA) section still advises editors to name runways with the airport identifier (SJC, JFK, etc.) in the beginning. Didn't we decide that practice could result in undesired population of autocomplete lists with runways?

It would be a shame to lose the text describing the order of precedence (IATA, then ICAO, then FAA), we worked a lot on that. Is there another article regarding airport naming where that text could be re-used?

sketch wrote:To the extent that information about choosing airport codes is not already present in the article about Places for airports, it should be transferred.

I agree, but, I can't seem to find the article about Places for airports. The Great Table in the master Places article has an entry for Airports, of course, but the only comment is "Special-handling" and it is not a link.