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Welcome to Waze Pakistan
You want to help too? Read along and join the local community of Waze Pakistan.
What is Waze?
Waze is a free GPS navigation application for mobile phone or tablet. Waze has speech support, free map updates and uses real time traffic information and actual reports from its users. Users like you!
With Waze you can share your driver experience, connect with friends, send your ETA to show when you will be home, or just avoid traffic jams. Waze is crowd-sourced, meaning it is maintained by its users.
Waze in Pakistan
Communication
Forums
Waze Forums are the official Waze communication platform where you will find a lot of information as an editor. Log into the Waze Pakistan forum using your Waze login and password as you would the editor or app. The forum also has Private Messages (PM) where you can send and receive messages to other editors.
WME Chat
While you are editing, you can directly request help in WME chat. It shows you the level of the editor you are talking to. Please keep in mind that most editors are willing to help, but not all of them have the technical knowledge or editing experience to give you the best answer. Because the built-in chat does not always work as desired, we mostly use Slack to communicate with local community editors.
Slack
While the Waze Forums are the official method of communications for anything Waze, the local editing community has adapted to Slack for its day to day communication amongst the editors. There are teaching classes and webinars to improve your editing skills. There are several channels, project groups, and you can send Direct Messages (DM) too. If you like to join into discussions and development of Waze Pakistan, Slack gives the best opportunities. You can request access to Slack by filling in this form. You will then receive an invitation to Slack, where you need to make an account.
Community
Editors
The community consists of all people that uses Waze on way or another. Drivers, editors, wiki master and the like. The current active community management in Pakistan is a mix of local and international editors. For any question or suggestion you can contact them via Waze forums or address one of the champs or project leaders directly from the tables below.
| Community leaders of Pakistan | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Editor | Rank/Level | Role | |
| Country Coordinator |
| ||
| Country Managers |
|
||
| Area Managers | |||
| Editor | Rank/Level | Area | |
| Area Managed | |||
| Special Assignment / Projects | |
|---|---|
| Editor | |
| Forum Moderators | |
| Mentoring | |
| Wiki Editors | |
| Supporting Foreign Editors | |
City and Streets
Naming
Unique naming is very important to find a specific address and to improve the end user navigation experience. In Pakistan, we have an additional aspect to consider while naming a city or street which is the dual language system. We are using English as well as Urdu as our language of communication; English is mainly for online tasks whereas Urdu (our National language) is used to communicate among people. The layman (as well as others) is using mainly Roman Urdu (Urdu written with Roman/English alphabets) to communicate while using different communication channels e.g., Mobile SMS, Internet etc. Urdu alphabets are also in use, though it seems difficult to type. One thing is sure that we humans are more comfortable in our native/national language than in English (or any other foreign language) and using Urdu in Naming would increase the outreach of Waze; the end user would see the map in his/her native/national language and would have more tendency to accept it and use it frequently. Hence, language factor must be considered to name a city and street etc.
In Pakistan, we don’t have unique names for each and every street; we have sometimes the street numbers and sometimes names and sometimes we don’t have any name at all for the streets. We are using sectors/ blocks/ community or colony names to find those streets, in our real life. Hence, the sectors/blocks/community/colony factor should also be considered while naming.
Pakistan Team has discussed the naming system for cities to be used and have determined to use Urdu names as the main names and English names as the alternative names. The alternate naming will not create city smudges as long as they aren't both listed on primary names anywhere. Street names as of right now should be left in English.
Example:
- City Name: ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان
- Alternative City Name: Dera Ismail Khan
Road names should follow the same format as cities, Urdu is primary and English is alt.
If you do not know the translation please leave the names marked as "None" and let the local community add the names or reach out to one of the local community members. Do not use online translators as they are not always accurate. Remember you can always navigate across blank road names but you cannot navigate without the roads.
Roads
Road Types
Pakistan is made up of many different types and styles of roads. Below is a list of a few of them.
- Freeway (FWY) - Motorways (limited access roads with no signal control)
- Major Highway (MH) - All National Highways (which have numbers likes N55 and Expressways which have numbers E..)
- Minor Highway (mH) - All roads that connect two cities.
- Primary Street (PS) - Major in-city roads and roads to small villages/Chak.
- Street - Streets within a city that are not listed as above. Typically neighbourhood roads.
- Private Road (PR) - Used for gated communities or private roads where the public would not be allowed to be routed through.
- Parking Lot Road (PLR) - Roads within a Parking Lot Area, such as shopping centers, Petrol Pumps etc.
Speed Limits
Rural Areas
- 120 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 100 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 80 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 100 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 80 km/hr
- 60 km/hr
- 50 km/hr
Urban Areas
- 120 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 50 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 50 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 50 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 50 km/hr
- 50 km/hr
- 40 km/hr
ISB, KHI & LHR
- 120 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 60 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 60 km/hr
- (ONE WAY) 60 km/hr
- (TWO WAY) 60 km/hr
- 60 km/hr
- 50 km/hr
Lock Levels
Minimum Road Lock Standard
| Minimum Road Lock Standard | ||
|---|---|---|
| Segment Type | Level | |
| Freeway (FWY) | 4 | |
| Ramp | HCS* | |
| Major Highway (MH) | 4 | |
| Minor Highway (mH) | 3 | |
| Primary Street (PS) | 2 | |
| Street | 1 | |
| Private Road (PR) | 1 | |
| Parking Lot Road (PLR) Parking Lot Road (Petrol Pumps) |
1
2 | |
| |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| Railroad |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| | 2 | |
| • • • • Ferry • • • • | 3 | |
| ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ Runway ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ ⁃ | 4 | |
* HCS - Locked to the Highest Connecting Segment Lock Level (mH to FWY ramp would be locked to 4)
 |
The lock levels above are minimums, meaning that segments may have higher locks. Note: Do Not Mass Edit just to update locks to these standards, these can be adjusted as you find them while editing other aspects of the segments. |
Bugs and limitations
Although we think Waze gives the best possibilities for navigation, it knows some problems and limitations as well. Specific for Pakistan are the following:
- The map needs to be improved
- Due to the status of the road network and the yet small community, the map in Pakistan is not of high quality everywhere. However, the current editing community is working hard to improve the map. You help already by driving with Waze on! And if you are in for an adventure, you might add new roads to the map, or even become a
Waze Map Editor.
- Long distance routing
- Setting a route over long distances puts a lot of weight on the servers. Depending on the map quality, you can expect routes up to any distance. At this moment, maximum route length will often be less in Pakistan*. If you request a route and the calculation time is too long, you'll receive an error saying "Routing server timeout" or "no route found". We recommend breaking up longer routes into several segments by choosing intermediate destinations.
- * Note that we are currently upgrading the road network to get better and longer routes!
- Known issues in the current app version are listed on the support pages
Wishing you fun and happy travels with Waze in Pakistan!