When creating a segment, it is important to ensure that any individual segment is longer than 5 meters or about 15 feet.
Why is this important?
When a segment is too short (less than 5 meters) it becomes difficult for the navigation engine to determine traffic speed through that segment. That will in turn negatively affect drive time estimations and best routing.
Determine the length
The length of a segment can be determined after it is created and saved by selecting it and looking at the general tab with the segment selected. The length will be displayed toward the bottom of the tab in meters. The length does not appear before it is saved.
Fixing short segments
There are a few instances where a single short segment may be present between two other segments with no other segments at those junctions.
- Loop roads. A single segment cannot loop back upon itself, so a junction is required to create two separate segments. It does not matter where the junctions is located, so long as each segment meets the minimum segment length.
- Road, city, or state name change. There are times when a road, city, or state name will change with no other intersecting road at that point. A junction is added to enable each side of the junction to have a different name.
- Ramp or freeway splits. There are cases where a freeway may split into two separate freeways. In order to provide navigation to drivers, it may be necessary to create short segments on the freeway to show the two different road names at the split. Under certain situations it may be best to make the segments as short as possible. This is covered in detail in the Junction Style Guide.
In the above cases, the segment is necessary so it cannot be deleted, but it can be made the minimum length and still meet the needs of the original purpose.
Short segments between intersections
There may be times when driveways or other roads join a main road with close proximity to each other. This may cause small segments to be created between the two junctions along that main road. If the segment is shorter than the minimum length, it may be best to simply merge the two intersections into a single junction. It is OK if the joining roads in the map do not exactly align with the visual map in the Waze Map Editor.