Waze landmarks serve to orient drivers and to establish app-searchable points-of-interest (POI) for situations where the primary POI search engines may not find the desired location. Despite these helpful attributes, landmarks are easily overused, leading to map clutter and POI redundancy. Waze offers a plethora of landmark types, but most of these do not really help drivers and are typically avoided.
In general, if a location is not extensive or significant enough to orient drivers, and is already searchable using the primary POI search engines, it should not be landmarked in Waze. Three common exceptions are gas stations, which receive special handling; government or transit-oriented destinations for the general public, such as parks and airports; and school or university campuses, whether public or private.
The Waze editing community in the US has not reached firm consensus regarding the landmarking of private or commercial property. On the one hand, Waze's business model includes on-map advertising, and free landmarking of competitors may discourage advertisers. On the other hand, landmarking large private country clubs, golf courses and retreat centers with extensive, highly-visible grounds may help orient drivers. Regardless, the twin criteria of either orienting drivers or not otherwise findable with a primary POI search engine apply to landmarking private as well as public locations.
Below is the list of Landmark Types provided by WME. This list is to facilitate a discussion in the forums about what Landmarks should and should not be included in the map The discussion is located at https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=276&t=26005 Eventually we hope for this to become the guide for which landmarks get mapped & how they get mapped.
Minimum landmark size
When creating a landmark, it is important to understand the client application will not display the landmark unless it is greater than 50 m (160 feet) when measuring the maximum size of the X or Y dimension.
If one dimension is over 50 m (160 feet), there is no requirement for the other dimension. Also the area of the landmark has no impact on whether it will display on the client app.
Transportation
Gas Station
Toll booth
Terminal
Airport
Train station
Bus Station / Bus Terminal
Sea Port
Parking Lot
Few parking lots deserve to be landmarked. Landmark-worthy parking must be something of a destination in itself, either having a well-known and marked name, or serving multiple unrelated POIs.
In nearly all cases, parking associated with a larger landmark, such as a shopping mall or train station, should not be landmarked separately using the Parking Lot type. It is sufficient simply to include such parking within the boundaries of the larger landmark. In the rare case of named parking that drivers might wish explicitly to seek, such "double landmarking" of parking within a larger landmark may be acceptable, for example a cell-phone parking landmark within the boundaries of an airport landmark.
Defining the boundaries of Parking Lot landmarks requires care. Like the Gas Station landmark, Parking Lots suppress Waze's automated detection of traffic jams and missing roads; thus the Parking Lot landmark should NEVER be drawn over or attached/snapped to roads bearing through traffic.
While Waze provides a Garage landmark type, the Parking Lot landmark should be used, when appropriate, for parking structures and garages both above and below ground as well as for ordinary lots at ground level.
The Parking Lot landmark is always appropriate for:
- Generic Park & Ride and similar municipal commuter parking not otherwise landmarked with a transit-center type. Always name these "Park & Ride", or whatever generic designation is used locally, to facilitate searches. Mapped at the fence line.
- Municipal general-purpose or transit-oriented public parking that has a unique and marked identity, such as "City Lot #7", "Hourly Lot 3", "Domestic Garage", "Long-Term Parking", "South Lot", "Cell-Phone Parking", etc. Map to the extent of the lot or structure and assign the given name. If the lot is contained within a larger landmark, do not repeat that landmark's name; for example if the Domestic Garage is contained within the "SFO San Francisco International Airport" landmark boundaries, it can simply be labeled "Domestic Garage" not "SFO San Francisco International Airport Domestic Garage".
- Rental car return located on airport property, provided all on-airport vendors share the same car return area (to avoid having to label separate return areas by commercial vendor), named "Rental Car Return".
The Parking Lot landmark is NEVER appropriate for:
- Parking for a single non-transit-oriented destination, such as a business, office, church, park, hospital, gym, school, museum, restaurant, campground, etc.
- Employee, resident, or guest parking
- Parking for attendees of events or services
- Parking associated with campuses, parklands, shopping malls, theme parks, private installations, and office parks or complexes of any size or purpose
- Generic unnamed/unidentified parking lots associated with an already-landmarked complex such as an Airport, Train station, or Bus Station/Bus Terminal
A gray area exists between the "always appropriate" and "never appropriate" categories above. Indeterminate situations include, for example:
- Unnamed municipal general-purpose public parking
- Privately-operated general-purpose or offsite transit-related public parking
- Public trailhead parking not within or associated with a well-defined park
At this time, landmarking indeterminate situations like these is not encouraged, but may be appropriate in some circumstances and handled on a case-by-case basis.