Talk:Australian Road Types & Naming View history

Revision as of 09:54, 23 July 2019 by Age4670 (talk | contribs)

Using "City" names on highways

A previous Country Manager promoted the idea that Major Highways should not have the City name filled in. This caused problems for large "Cities" (such as Nullarbor) as it meant that the Waze City polygon did not cover the entire suburb, and some remote normal roads could not have the City field filled in as a result. No convincing reason was produced why this should be the rule. More recently, iainhouse advises that the UK does use City names on highways so that announcements like "Heavy traffic on <highway> near <City>" are more informative. See forum posting.

Notes on default speeds for various road types

(This is an evolving record of my understanding of default speeds. It contains conjecture, but may evolve into something that can become part of the main Wiki article.)

  • Waze sets a default average speed for road segments when they are first generated. When drivers use the road with Waze running, Waze updates the average speed based on the speeds it sees
  • Waze probably records the elapsed time to traverse each segment and make each turn at the end, although we usually refer to it as recording the speed rather than the time. One implication is that it only needs to know the time at the start and end of the segment; loss of GPS coverage in the middle (as in a tunnel, for example) shouldn't matter.
  • If Waze doesn't have a server connection at the (?beginning and?) end of the segment, it won't be able to update its record of the elapsed time for the segment. (Subject to whatever buffering of data it does when it doesn't have a connection to the server - which appears to be minimal.) This means the average speed for the segment may never get updated.
  • This presents problems in remote areas with no mobile coverage. Segments may have unrealistically low average speeds, resulting in much higher estimates of travel times, and sometimes selection of a longer route which in reality is slower.
  • The default speeds for the various road types, based on the Route Speeds script, are:
Segment Type Default km/hr Comment
Narrow Street 20 May not represent actual implementation
Private Road 20
Street 20
Primary Street 30
Ramp 65 May depend on type of connecting roads
Minor Highway 65
Major Highway 75
Freeway 100

Some of these are unrealistically low - a country Minor Highway is likely to have an average speed well in excess of 65 km/hr. For example https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=row&lon=114.69867&lat=-28.62531&zoom=2&segments=264477048 is a Minor Highway but has an average speed of 100 km/hr.

(Further conjecture here removed, as it turned out to be unreliable.)

  • the speed limit set at the time of segment creation has no effect on default average speed (tested on Freeways only).
  • the "unpaved" flag doesn't affect default speed (at least for Freeway and Major Highway)
  • the "preferred routing" flag doesn't affect default speed (at least Primary)

TTS Peculiarities

  • In rare cases where both routes are required, to ensure correct TTS the routes must be separated by a slash including spaces - "TRx / SRxx - Name". This should be discussed with your State Manager prior to using.
  • English and UK voices behave differently:
    • A E - UK will pronunce "A" "E", US will interpret as compass direction - A East
    • FE - UK will pronounce as word "Fay", US will spell - "F" E"