Hi all, the town centre of Athlone, co. Westmeath is being refurbished in the recent and upcoming few months. As part of the programme, Church street, Dublingate street, and Mardyke street are to be closed to traffic in a rolling fashion.
I’ve changed the traffic directions as needed, but now it’s time for some road closures, which I’m not able to do myself due to my editor level. (At a previous time I’ve done this as restrictions, but I understand it’s not the best way to do it.)
So, may I ask that the following closures will be done:
Segment 119185583, Dublin Gate street between the Prince of Wales Hotel parking lot and Friary lane, and
As I’m not too sure when the roadworks (and closures) will roll further west, I think the closures need to be either for a good few weeks or permanently. I live nearby so I can keep an eye on it.
Do you have any dates for those closures? I can do them (probably tomorrow), but we need definite start and end dates (and times) - if we get those wrong then the streets will be closed when it should be OK to route people down them and open when users shouldn’t be routed down them. Even if we get just a couple of days notice of each closure starting and ending that would help a lot.
Hi David, how are you?
Thanks for your reply - I must have missed it :?
The roadworks are slowly but surely going on. Those two segments still need to be blocked 24/7 so that traffic will be routed around them (through Griffith street and The Strand). Unfortunately, there is no way to know the when the roadworks (and the blocked roads) will advance further west, but from the looks of it, I assume it will take at least ten more days, and maybe much more (took these photos yesterday and the day before: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CnYkWiZSP8Aaxt3u8https://photos.app.goo.gl/ohiwzBiSLkvbTZUPA ). Anyway, I’m around there on a daily basis, so I’ll let you know about any change.
One more thing: I noticed that Waze started routing traffic through Dublin Gate / Church street once again. Upon inspection, I found out that some of the changes I made were reverted, and there is an editing level lock for the area that should be blocked - probably put on due to me defining traffic restrictions and disallowing turns in order to force the correct routing (I saw a discussion about it but cannot find it now). Could you please look into that as well?
Thanks for coming back to this thread. I was looking at this area recently and I’d forgotten about this thread and then when there was discussion about the edits in Athlone I knew I’d been talking to you but I couldn’t find any messages.
Anyway, about the changes being reverted: Yanis saw your edits and thought they seemed a bit odd, and he didn’t have the local knowledge about the road works (or this forum thread). That’s why they got reverted and then locked. You can see the discussion about it in a map comment at that location.
Going forward: do the road segments here all have the right direction on them (even though they may be closed at the moment)?
Can you post a permalink of every segment that’s supposed to be closed, and we’ll put a closure on each closed segment that lasts for seven days?
Can you do an update every day (if possible) and post permalinks of:
any segments that are still closed.
any segments that have closed since the last update.
any segments that are now open again.
for any open segments, whether they’re now two-way, one-way or one-way in a different direction to before.
If you can do this then we’ll add new closures and remove old ones, and update existing closures to last for seven more days. Closures are much better than time-based restrictions, because when we add a closure it takes effect immediately and also displays with red and white stripes on users’ phone screens, so they’re much better than time-based restrictions.
For such unclear timelines I suggest to set the closure for a longer period rather than a shorter one, and check the progress before that expires. User experience is far more negative when they’re navigated through a closed road, rather than navigated via an alternative route.
Good point - if a user is directed through a closed road then they have to take a different turn in a hurry and hope for the best. I think that explains why the GPS tracks in the centre of Athlone show lots of traffic through the small side streets south of the main street.
How about putting a closure of 28 days (four weeks) on the segments we know are closed? (certainly the ones that the GPS tracks show nobody has driven on recently).
Gal, can you then check which segments are physically closed at the moment and which are open, so we can refine the closures and make sure only the correct streets have closures on them?
If you could check on them every few days then we can keep the closures up to date as they move around.
Thanks for your help here - it’s so much easier with somebody local, especially when there aren’t good published dates for closures! I’m in Wicklow, so it’s hard for me to check out Athlone in person regularly.
Thanks David and Yanis for looking into this.
As far as I can see, all segments have the right directions - as in the temporary arrangements in place (i.e. one-way segments which are now temporarily two-way to allow for traffic to enter hotel garage, etc.).
I’ll update (in this thread?) about closure changes, but for now, it seems that it might take at least ten more days for the roadworks to advance westwards.
Thank you for all your help. I’m learning quite a bit about Waze map editor from this.
I put a closure in on these 2 segments from now until 21 Aug 23:59, and a reminder around that time in order to follow up (just in case this thread goes silent).
Gal: thanks for the update! Please keep the updates coming as soon as you see them. You should see in Live Map as well as on your phone that they’re very brightly visible as being closed, which users should like.
Yanis: thanks for placing the closures.
I haven’t used the new Narrow Street road type much at all: do you know if it has much impact on routing penalties?
It might be OK just to leave it as it is: once a few drivers go that way, Waze should learn that it takes a long time to make the turn and realise that other routes are faster.
I wonder if road workers also like to take holidays around now. Around me, there are lots of road works going on, although the ones I know of are around the local schools: I think they’re trying to get them done while the school holidays are on. Squashing school kids isn’t popular
I didn’t realise the penalty was that large. In that case, it’s probably more of a penalty than what Waze might learn over (say) a two week learning period.
Go ahead and set it to Narrow Street so, and let’s see how it works out.
In the past (before Narrow Street) I’ve set some narrow alley-like streets to “Private Street” because Waze was trying to route people down them to avoid traffic lights. They really were so tight it wasn’t at all practical to drive down them. The number of cars that would actually drive down them would be so small that Waze would probably never learn that they were slow to use.
I did the same marking some as Private Street “back in the day”. Only people who know what they’re doing should go down these alleys. Here’s an entertaining example I was once routed through: Permalink and Streetview.
That’s correct. This segment is open (in real life, as in Waze) to allow for traffic to reach the Prince of Wales hotel.
One more thing:
All routing in the area looks good now, except for one route: Live Map; Screenshot attached.
While the routing is technically possible, it’s quite an awkward one, and I can’t think of a time it should be faster than going straight through R915 towards Broderick street. I can’t find anything in the editor (i.e., turn restrictions etc.). Is there anything I miss?
I was wondering if the left turn from Mardyke St onto Sean Costello Rd was legal - is it? The SV and satellite images are out of date, so I can’t tell from here.
Did you mean that this turn was legal but awkward? If it is legal then we shouldn’t put a turn restriction here. However, for the moment, I’ve marked that turn as a difficult turn, which should increase the routing penalty for it. The segments are all fairly short and the route you show goes through the same number of junction nodes, so it’s possible that (from the routing engine’s point of view) it’s just as good as the obvious route.
Wait a couple of days until the next tile build and we’ll see if marking it as a difficult turn has helped.
One related question though: should westbound traffic from R915 Mardyke St get any instruction at all or should it say “turn right”? The current junction angles mean that no instruction will be given, which might not be correct.
The turn left from Mardyke St to Sean Costello Rd is apparently legal (even though, IIRC, there might be a blurred arrow on the road contradicting this…), but it is quite difficult indeed (the physical layout of the junction hasn’t changed yet from the one in sat/street view). So penalising it with a “difficult turn” status sounds good.
Not too sure. I think “Turn right” sounds a bit better than nothing, as there’s a yield sign at the end of R915 Mardyke St, as well as it should be quite clear for anyone in R915 that they are merging into a different street. On the other hand, this part of the street hasn’t got its share of renovations yet, so things might change.
Ah - if there’s a yield sign then it should definitely say “turn right”. I’ve just changed the junction angles a bit so that it will do that. I do this in a lot of Y-shaped junctions where otherwise somebody coming out of a side road doesn’t get any instructions at all and might fly into a main road thinking their road just continues.
thanks for keeping an eye on things on the ground!
Has there been any change to what’s open and what’s closed?
I ask because the existing closures expire soon, so if we don’t update them then all the road segments will automatically open in Waze and users will be routed down that road, even if the road works are still ongoing.
If you could check to see what’s happening that’d be great. If there’s no change then we’ll just extend the closures by another week and check again then.
