Any particular reason why all these new road changes are locked at level 3 and up? It's preventing us low level plebs from fixing a lot of the URs in the Boston area...

Thanks for the reply, scott_h. I figured that was the case, but like grsing stated, there are more major hwys than there used to be. Is it a rule that all major highways should be automatically locked at level 3 or higher?

Also, is there some sort of expiration date on locks? I've noticed a lot of roads in more rural areas that will only have one or two segments locked; presumably because someone was messing with them too much. Is there a point where those locks can be taken off after a certain amount of time?

Same. Unfortunately, I suspect most of our esteemed editing brethren do not regularly check the forums. :-/

Also, as some of the senior editors made changes they locked a lot of Major Highways at level 3 that used to be unlocked. It is irritating, given just how many major highways there are in the area. Good incentive for me to try to make level 3

For those Mass editors who haven't seen it, here's the Wiki To Do page: https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Massachusetts/To_do

There's lots yet to do, so anybody who can help out would be appreciated

Scott_h:

I don't think anybody has an issue with major roads in Boston being locked at high ranks, that absolutely makes sense; you don't want the newbie who just mapped every path in Boston Common messing with major roads. I think the question came up because when a bunch of roads were upgraded to Major Highway as part of the functional classification effort, they were newly locked at level 3. I'm not saying that's wrong or a bad thing at all, but since there are so many roads that are Major Highways in the Boston area, it does mean there are a lot of locked roads that didn't use to be locked.

BaronScot, that's the categorization I've been going by as well.

jasonm128:

I've also been pretty hesitant to downgrade roads, especially the primary streets to streets. I see the point in upgrading to match the federal classifications, but downgrading roads that really are primary routes doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I haven't seen many (maybe any?) instances of major or minor highways getting downgraded, so I haven't worried about that so far.

GooberKing wrote:Same. Unfortunately, I suspect most of our esteemed editing brethren do not regularly check the forums. :-/

Can you blame them? I used to read every message in the forums faithfully but had to quit about a year ago when it started taking me 2 hours a day just to keep up.

Anyway, since the new classifications are a huge change and don't match the common-sense definition of "major highway" or "minor highway" (at least for the Boston area) there's bound to be people that try to change them back. If you're sure you set the road type correctly based on the federal classification, and someone changes it, then a private message is definitely the right thing to do. Maybe they don't know about the changes or maybe they disagree with the classifications.

I've come across several places where the MassDOT classification map makes no sense and have chosen to ignore it. For example, I've seen dead-end residential streets marked as "major collectors" but left it as a street instead of a minor highway. I think sometimes an entire street will be classified at a high level when they meant to only classify part of it. I have also chosen to leave some extra streets as "primary street" even though they are unclassified on the map, particularly if they show a lot of GPS traces. I think the federal classifications are a great starting point but we shouldn't be blindly following them without looking at what we are doing or thinking. Even the Feds make mistakes.

Since no one else has addressed this, I will take a shot at it and anyone can correct me where I mis-speak.

Major roadways in the Boston area are locked at high ranks the same as they are are most major cities, to prevent low level editors who do not understand the intricacies and implications of editing from breaking routing on these major roadways. This is the purpose of the ranking system. Until someone has attained rank 3 they typically do not have the knowledge required to edit major roadways. Even then some some rapidly rising point hounds get to higher ranks with with minimal knowledge due to the lack of proper training materials, the lack of testing to drive editors to the training materials and the ease of gaining points. The Boston area has a history of newbie routing corruption and this locking at higher ranks made a huge difference in the number of UR's that were routing errors. In the last year the majority of URs are Google map location issues.