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Post by thefatveganchef
CBenson wrote:
PhantomSoul wrote:I would think that any unpaved road, by definition, cannot be a highway.
Any definition needs to apply worldwide and I suspect that unpaved highways do exist.
I have read a few threads in the forums where the New Zelandars were trying to figure out whether or not to mark their unpaved highways as dirt road or major/minor highway. I think they have a lot of unpaved highways that run the majority of their infrastructure.
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Post by thingumybob
Hi. As someone who has passed quite a lot of time in Africa where "dirt" is common and may be anything between hard and usable by most vehicles post-grading to liquid mud and only passable on two or four legs during the rainy season, trying to do what road engineers worldwide have failed to do (create a foolproof classification system for roads) if beyond even the specialists of Waze :-)
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Post by troyv
Aren't we getting too complicated on all these road designations and characteristics?

I generally think what we have now is acceptable. The only thing I would change is to rename "Dirt/4x4 road" to just "4x4 road", and remove the "service road" designation. In general, I don't think the user really cares about the surface of the road. And if the surface of the road is poor (not talking about 4x4 routes), that means that the speeds on those roads will be lower, and thus, Waze will learn to avoid those routes. Also, the amount of information that needs maintained and can be out of date goes way up.

I just think we need to keep it simple, and not go crazy with road attributes.

(I originally posted this in the "US Forest Service Roads" thread but I think it is more relevant here)
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Post by troyv
skbun wrote: There is a standing request which started with the US 2013 meetup in February to do the following:

- Eliminate the 'service road' road type
- Rename 'Dirt/4x4 road' to 'Unpaved'
- Add a new type called '4x4/offroad/I-forget-the-exact-word', an even "lower" class than 'Unpaved'.

Doing this would still allow users to use the checkboxes that say 'Avoid unpaved roads' or 'Avoid long ones' meaningfully, while also keeping it simple for the user. As far as I know there is no ETA on these changes being made.
I guess my eyebrows got raised when I saw using types of pavements, like sealcoating, as an attribute for roads. Maybe part of that was in the other thread I posted where I saw that. I don't see much of that in this thread.

My other thing with perfectly drivable gravel roads is why would you want to avoid it? I do see some reasons for avoiding those types of roads mentioned in here, like paint getting chipped and excess dust, and messing up your car. That seems reasonable. But I also see that if a graveled road is a popular and efficient route anyway, I would think that the municipality in charge would want to pave it. I guess I am not a real big fan of the "unpaved" attribute. I just don't see enough reason to have it.
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Post by troyv
AnotherHiggins wrote:
troyv wrote:And if the surface of the road is poor (not talking about 4x4 routes), that means that the speeds on those roads will be lower, and thus, Waze will learn to avoid those routes.
One problem with that logic: poorly-maintained gravel roads inherently have fewer drivers using them. That reduces the odds that any of those drivers have Waze running while they drive on the poorly-maintained gravel roads. That means it's entirely likely that Waze won't have any baseline speed data for the segment(s), and therefore won't know to avoid them.
I agree with your argument and here is why.

So my original thinking was that if we were to use a network topology as an analogy, the router (Waze) would just send packets (users) down a certain segment (road) and see what the results were. If the packets (users) made it down a certain segment (road) OK, then the router would send more. That's great in the network world, but if Waze were to guide a user on to a rocky hiking trail in the forest using their Ford Taurus, that would be a bad thing. Basically, we shouldn't treat users as packets in a network.

Now I am thinking out loud a little bit..

What if we took advantage of users and had a "get me out of here" button on the client. If that button is hit, Waze would attempt to guide the user to the closest well driven road as quickly as possible. Not only would it do that but it would take a note as to what road the user was on. When Waze was tempted to route another user that same way, it would see that a previous user wanted off of that road. Waze then would have learned a little bit to avoid that road segment when routing for future users.

That's my $.03 (Have to account for inflation)
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Post by WeeeZer14
I'll just mention that the term "Primitive Road" is foreign to most east coasters ;)
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Post by WeeeZer14
harling wrote:
WeeeZer14 wrote:I'll just mention that the term "Primitive Road" is foreign to most east coasters ;)
True: by now all the cow-paths have been paved. But we do have a functional equivalent: roads that have so many potholes and so much broken pavement that they have reverted to Thomas Hobbes' "State of Nature".
So anything not paved in the past 24 hours :lol:
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