Philippines/Editing resources

1. Create road (whether tracing aerial images/gps points, or from recorded drives)

2. Set road type, some suggestions;

• Freeways – Expressways and Toll Roads
• Major Highway – Road that crosses multiple provinces
• Minor Highway – Road that crosses multiple cities or municipalities
• Ramps – On and off ramps from Freeways
• Primary Street – Main thoroughfares of a city or municipality
• Street – ordinary street, mainly residential
• Service Roads – usually access roads leading to or from an establishment, an intersection, that is in parallel with a major or minor highways or freeways (expressways)
• Dirt-roads / 4x4 Trails – driveable roads but not used for routing, except when 'allow dirt roads' option is enabled, you can also select this if the road is too narrow like an alleyway, an unpaved road, or only motorbikes and tricycles use it.
• Parking Lot Road – driveable roads within a commercial or private parking lots, not used for routing
• Private Road – driveable roads within gated communities, subdivisions, villages, or compounds. Not used for routing
• Walking Trails, Pedestrian Boardwalk, Stairway, Railroad, Runway/Taxiway – other non drivable and non-routable roads

3. Set directionality (two way, one way, dead end)

4. Set the level (ground level = 0, Underpass = -1, Flyover = 1, 2, 3, etc.)

5. Connect or create junctions (attach to existing roads)

6. Set turn restrictions and if u-turns are allowed on junctions

7. Name the road, if you don't know the name leave it alone. Somebody else could edit it. It will be highlighted in red so that other editors can easily see it as an un-named street.

8. When naming streets, omit "City" and "Street". Eg. "Pasig City" to "Pasig" only and "Dela Rosa Street" to "Dela Rosa" only. Except when they are not "Streets" like "Kamias Road", "Aurora Boulevard", "Ayala Avenue", etc. If you are going to abbreviate, make sure you follow Waze Abbreviations and TTS standards so that our street names are ready for TTS (Text To Speech).

Please give extra care on labeling the CITY of your edits. Unlike STREET names which reflects edits (or corrections) quicker and appears on the next update, CITY names unfortunately embeds much longer on the CITY tiles in the servers. So misspelled CITY names reflected during an update will appear for a long time in the client (waze) despite any corrections made.

Kindly stick to the OFFICIAL (but shortest possible) NAME of the jurisdiction being edited. Also, if you are UNSURE of the POLITICAL BOUNDARIES of the "CITY" you are editing, leave it at that for the moment. let's leave it to the more experienced & knowledgeable editors to sort this mater out.

Another matter of CITY labels, we omit the "city" to derive the shortest possible official political name of the area. The only exceptions are QUEZON, CEBU, DAVAO, CAVITE, etc as these cities have a provincial counterpart. 

This will distinguish Quezon City with the province of Quezon, Cebu City with the province of Cebu, so on & so forth.

All other cities (& municipalities) will stand on its own without the label "City" or "Municipality", provided it does not have a same Province name.

Currently there is a Waze issues with cities with duplicate names. To address that issue, the city or municipality's provice's initial is added to the name. e.g. Alaminos (L) for Laguna, Alaminos (P) for Pangasinan. For a complete list, refer to this list of repeating city names for a complete listing of all the cities and municipalities within the Philippines.

9. Do not split roads unless they are Expressways, Major, and Minor Highways. Even if they are Major or Minor highways, do not split them if they do not have wide median barriers. Split roads complicate routes and are harder to maintain.

Some formal guidelines for splitting roads in the Philippines - A road should be split if:

• There is at least 5 meters of non-drivable surface between directions of travel. (This means a median of some type like cement, planter boxes, trees, or just grass.
• GPS tracks show a clearly definable gap/blank area between the color-by-azimuth arrows at the 100m zoom level.
• U-Turns are required to properly make turns that are blocked by a median.

A road should not be split because:

• There is a curb or non-drivable media less than 5m wide between lanes of travel. This means a turn lane, even a wide one, between directions of travel, does not count because it is drivable.
• There are a lot of roads intersecting which can only turn onto the nearest direction of travel.
• Google Maps or other mapping source show it as a split road
• The non-drivable median is interrupted by a cross segment at most intersections.

Turn Lanes - do not create dedicated turn lanes unless you can see distinct GPS tracks when you zoom in at 100m level. Or if there is an automatic update request from Waze that suggests you add the turn lane.

10. When you are confident on an area you have mapped, lock the roads to prevent any changes or edits on the roads. While we appreciate the help newbie waze editors in editing our maps, they are prone to creating errors if not informed  and educated properly on our map editing guidelines. It would be great if we can direct them to read this guide first before they start doing any edits. Tollways and Major highways are to be locked to level 4 because these will rarely change so will require little to no editing. Minor and Primary streets are to be locked to level 3 so they can be managed by their respective Area Managers. Other streets are to be locket to level 3 at the discretion of the Area Managers responsible for them.

11. Adding Landmarks and Gas Stations; Waze doesn't have POIs (Places Of Interests) yet and instead use Landmarks and FourSquare as POI locators. When adding a Landmark and Gas Station, make sure their location is properly identified through the add landmark draw function and add the address in the details as well. If a landmark will cover beyond a city's/minicipality's boundary or will cover more than one city/municipality, mark the city address as none. For bodies of water like creeks, rivers, lakes, sea, etc. mark the city address as none, this is so that their area will not be added to the city tile. 

12. KISS! - Keep It Simple, Stupid! Our maps should work best if they are kept simple rather than made complex, therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.