Private Installation Roads - gov/mil/public-sector

Map Editors Community United States
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Based upon prior conversations and a number of side discussions at the Waze Meetup 2013, here is a suggested approach to handling larger private installations, and perhaps all private communities. I’ll start with definitions and a proposal followed by discussions.

Discussion:

There seems to have been two approaches I have read in the Wiki and Forum about how to handle installations in order to prevent general routing through that area. The two approaches seemed to be (A) mark one or more road segments as private at each entrance/exit to the installation (and perhaps one-way exit roads could be normal street type roads), and (B) mark all the roads within the installation as private. My guess is that those who advocated (B) didn’t consider nested level of access.

I submit that (B) will not work in general because it is quite common for government or military installations to have various zones of privacy or limited access. This is the same as nested levels of access. If we were to use (B) then it would be impossible to differentiate these various areas and one would be routed through inappropriate areas while on the larger installation. Although more rare or highly unlikely, commercial campuses (controlled by a company) and private-sector installations could also have such areas. Examples might be huge hunting lodges in the western US (some in NM) that have roads that are private around the lodge, but even more restricted access to the hunt area. Another common example are roads that go from public to private land that have multiple lock gates and cattle guards where the owners of the deepest property have all the keys to get in while those in the nearest nested access have fewer keys and gates to go through to reach their property.

Waze is used on these installations as demonstrated by GPS points. Some installations are huge and include highways, such as White Sands and some bases in southern California and Nevada. Many of the installations have many visitors that could use an up-to-date nav app.

Using approach (A), I am currently working on understanding exactly how Waze routes into and out of an installation like this, even without consideration of nesting. Routing in seems to work well. Routing out seems to have some strange dependence on one particular exit over the others until you get very close. This may be that a one-way exit is of normal street type, the lengths may be different, or there are a different number of private segments at one exit over another. I am trying to understand if the private road penalty is based upon number of segments or length of segments. Of course, this behavior is algorithmically influenced, and could change at any time based upon Waze’s routing algorithm changes.

Comments?

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Perhaps private road for all normally allowed roads and service roads or parking lot roads for restricted lanes of travel?

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Nacron – If I am interpreting your suggestion correctly, you suggest that a whole “installation” be marked private but that the boundaries between public roads and the installation be separated by either parking lot or service roads? Is that right?

I guess that is another way to potentially get the behavior on routing. My comment back would be that this seems more complicated because it brings in a different type of road that may algorithmically change meaning based upon how Waze decides to route. If they do then we would be in trouble. In addition, the roads within an “installation” are not either service roads or parking lot roads, so I would see this as more of a hack than an attempt to be more simple. I would not want all the roads in a military base to be parking lot roads or service roads because it limits the diversity of roads on an installation. These large installations have a mix of streets, primary streets, and various highways. There are huge installations like White Sands in NM.

I have driven all the bases on Oahu before (they are quite fun). None are huge, but some of them, like Pearl, have primary streets. How would your suggestion and mine go to making things work there?

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I’ve talked with a few others that were at the meetup, and since this is an atypical situation (many military bases only have one level of drive-on security), it needs to be considered on a case by case basis. I don’t have any objections to doing this as long as it is tested and verified that it works.

This shouldn’t be publicized much as doing this is the exception, rather than the rule, or at the minimum noted as such…

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I believe that the above is in generally incorrect. I suspect that the references to approach (A) are vestiges from before private roads worked as they do now (i.e. from when there was a higher penalty for routing over a higher number of private road segments). Once waze corrected that problem, my understanding was that (B) was the agreed upon method to use. My experience is that (B) works much better than (A) because (A) essentially completely fails whenever someone changes one of the entrance roads.

It is quite possible to handle nested zones of access using (B). You just add short segments of regular streets at the entrances to the inner zone.

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The only time it wouldn’t work is when the zones are not strictly concentric. If you have two routes out–one via five zone transitions involving “Level 1” and “Level 2” areas, and the other involving only three zone transitions but involving “Level 3”–Waze will recommend the second over the first.

That said, I agree that when a straightforward approach like (B) doesn’t work, it should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and that a best-practice approach to this special-case scenario needs to be thought out. My concern about discussing them before a general audience is that the strategies developed (e.g., the use of multiple one-way roads of various types) for these few special situations could end up proliferating where they are not necessary–smaller military installations, mall parking lots, etc… So we need to make it painfully clear that these strategies apply only to a few very large military/government installations, and not to every base and post office. :slight_smile:

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Ok, but that doesn’t favor (A) over (B).

I agree that these multiple level access cases are better handled on case-by-case basis rather than with a general rule.

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Not commenting on (A) vs (B), just pointing out a shortcoming in the latter. (That Math degree kicking in again…)

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Hey everyone. Thanks for all the comments. Really appreciate it. Rather than reply individually, I will categorically summarize here and comment and hope for further information and enlightenment.

(1) This is an uncommon situation.

I don’t see this as uncommon or atypical at all, but suppose it depends on how you define that. There are private installations all over the place but their total road area is small compared to the rest of the world. Look at my list. This doesn’t mean we couldn’t use a standard. The most complex ones are probably military bases and gov areas, but all the others I listed are important. I forgot to also mention airports, so just edited that in. The simpler ones are gated communities. There are bunches of these. If this is uncommon or atypical, as some of you have said, what is your logic around that position?

I really think we could use some guidance because this is not uncommon. If we treat gated communities differently, that’s fine, but I really don’t agree with the (B) approach as it requires maintaining many private roads, not just one or two at entrances. It doesn’t seem nearly as elegant and simple as (A).

(2) @Benson suggested my data was incorrect in that (B) was agreed upon in the past and (A) is a vestige. Others may have agreed or not… I wasn’t sure.

I know that (A) works. I also know that (B) does not work for all cases. It is evident logically that (B) can only work part of the time. It would also seem that (B) takes a lot more maintenance in that we’d have to change (tens of?) thousands of roads to private. It does not work for zoned security. I would rather see a single unified approach, if possible, rather than a bunch of exceptions.

I also don’t understand why we would not publicize this. We ought to have good documentation on all special cases so we know how they are treated. Wouldn’t publicizing it make things better? If not, I would like to understand what experience has lead one to believe not documenting an approach like this is a good thing. I am always seeing chaos on forums and elsewhere because there is no standard to reference. Doesn’t mean everyone is going to follow it anyway!

(3) The method (A) completely fails whenever someone changes the entrance roads.

I don’t quite understand this logic, so would appreciate more ideas and clarification on it. I would propose to those agreeing with the above that almost everything in waze fails when someone changes one thing. Deleting a road can cause a reroute or prevent entry into a fully private marked closed community. So, the fact that someone can change one thing and cause a failure is not surprising. That is why I suggested that all such entrance areas be locked as high as possible.

I understand a fully private-marked area is more robust in general to a change, but that seems like going a bit overboard, especially in larger places.

(4) Concentric security zones are uncommon on bases.

This hasn’t been my experience. I have been on bases all over the US. Most have at least two levels. Three is rare but does happen. Usually it is two levels with the first being general access then a bunch of level-2 zones within. I do agree that there are some smaller installations that have one zone. With the influence of consolidating bases, many bases now hold multiple organizations, all with their own zones of security. In some cases that’s just a building, but in many it is a whole campus or set of roads. Testing this doesn’t require the ability to drive, but I have that ability so can test options.

When there is just one zone, another issue is that the larger installations are huge. Using (B) seems impractical. I wouldn’t want to map everything as private on a larger installation. It doesn’t seem like the right use of private roads either. In addition, as I mentioned in my original post, use of private roads only will keep us from using primary streets, highways, etc. The larger installations have highways!

(5) This is an exception and should only be applied to “very large” installations.

If so, what is large? How would you define that?

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It is not evident logically to me. Could you provide an example for which (A) works that (B) does not?

It might take more to set up, but if there are tens of thousands of roads to set to private under (B) then there is still much work to set each entrance under (A). The problem with (A) is that you have to be perfect in identifying each entrance and exit attached to the outside world. Ultimately, maintaining this perfection is more maintenance. Option (B) does not have this problem.

Option (B) does work for zoned security. It seems to work for the NSA and Fort Meade for instance.

If you are relying on private road segments to prevent through routing then under option (A) if one of the segments that needs to be a private road is not correctly set to private then anyone being routed on or off the campus will be routed through that exit/entrance. Mislabeling one segment under option (B) does not cause anything to fail.

Any campus that is large enough that there is some reason to have a road type higher than street on it.

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Of the set of all areas in which only authorized personnel are allowed to enter, areas that have hierarchical security–in which internal roads lead to areas requiring additional security; areas that are large & central enough that Waze needs to know to try to avoid them–are a subset.

The problem to which I was responding was about facilities in which roads lead to areas with varying levels of security–and the challenge is how to navigate in/out while keeping security requirements to a minimum, under the assumption that Waze should not try to route you through an area that requires a higher degree of authorization than your starting/destination point.

I explained this: if there is a practice that is necessary in select cases, and only introduces unneeded complexity in the majority, we don’t want people to walk away from this discussion with the idea that it should be done this way everywhere.

I did not say that. I pointed out that a certain strategy is not foolproof if all security zones are not concentric.

Large enough to incorporate multiple levels of security, such that internal navigation would (ideally) know how to avoid higher-security areas on the way in/out.

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An example of this can be found at the base(s) just outside Cheyenne, WY or Colorado Springs.

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A border line case could be the Y-12 National Security Complex near me in Oak Ridge (you know, the Manhattan Project that developed bombs for WWII). The main road bisecting the complex regularly sees traffic above 45/50 mph and I get lots of complaints that the road disappears due to auto zoom :wink:

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So how do you prevent through routing at someplace like Fort Carson?

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I don’t usually do anything in the Colorado Springs area and from the looks of it Fort Carson is a mess. Probably bad at the Air Force Academy, Peterson, and Schriever as well.

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The vast majority of these private complexes are gated communities, corporate campuses - all with out multiple layers of security. Once you are in a gated community, you can drive anywhere in the complex. Those should be maintained with the current standard. As for this proposal, assuming it has been tested & works, it needs to be something that is evaluated & done on a case-by-case basis by senior editors because security levels is going to get complicated.

How do these multiple layers of security work? Is the second layer to just get into a small set of roads where one would park for access to buildings or does the second layer contain miles of roads? If it’s the first, why not use parking lot roads?

Well, those large enough to have multiple security zones.

Since it would have to be the exception rather than the rule, it would have to be noted as such. Something like a subsection on the wiki page that says something along the lines of “In the case of a large military installation with multiple layers of security (higher level security zones once past the base gate), a method has been created to deal with this situation. These areas have been mapped in a very specific manner by Senior Area Managers and Country Managers to prevent Waze from routing through them. For more information please contact your Senior Area Manager, a Local Country Manager, or your Regional Coordinator.”

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BTW, I have entered that facility regularly. There is a main road along the edge that doesn’t go inside the secure perimeter that could have high speed. I would be surprised that the main road through the facility has high speed. My guess is that whole valley will become restricted soon.

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(B) does not work for three reasons I can think of:

 (1) Roads higher than street.  If everything is private, you cannot have primary streets and highways.  These can exist even in moderately small installations (not just government, but private sector too).  If it is a small private installation, like a small private community of a few to 10 roads, this certainly could work.

 (2) Multi-level security zones.  At least that is my assertion if everything is private.  Someone suggested having normal roads between private sections, but this seems a bit odd and I bet would not work.  I can test it.

 (3) It seems impractical and not efficient to mark even moderately small facilities as all private roads.  It just doesn't seem sustainable and that is not how they work.  Once you are in one zone of privacy, then you can go anywhere in that zone.   Why have bunches of private roads, that are in a way, no longer private once you have access?  This is probably a fun debate but not easily resolvable to everyone's satisfaction.
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Interesting points. Perhaps we are not seeing the same thing and you have other insights.

In my experience, there is not much work at all, in fact a few minutes work, to set up each entrance under (A). The work for (B) far exceeds the work for (A) for normal facilities that I know. That is why I suggested it. These private installations by default have only a few entrances. If there were many, it would cost too much for gates and guards.

If you are local to the installation or are familiar with the overhead imagery, it is relatively trivial to identify the entrances. It is easy to be perfect with this, at least in my opinion. But I may be biased since I know a lot about this topic. I disagree that maintaining a very small set of entrances to a facility is more work than (B). I know (B) would be a lot more work and is not effective per my last post (no primary streets, etc., much more work, harder to change, no multiple-level security zones).

You seem to have a strong opinion on this, not that I don’t, so it makes me curious which installations you’re thinking about when you make these comments. If I knew that, I might be able to better see where your opinion is coming from. Do you go on and off of such an installation?

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It does? I will have to go look at those installations. I am familiar with them but have not seen them on Waze. Ft. Meade and NSA are the same thing, by the way. I don’t recall zoned security on roads for Ft. Meade, so all private roads might work, except that it would not allow secondary roads which exist on that installation.

Will write back here later when I have checked Waze.