First of all, keep in mind that this is a somewhat experimental feature and it will probably evolve.
Traffic locks also known as Road Ranks:
A segment lock in general means that a segment can only be edited by an editor with a sufficient rank. For more details, see Editing permissions. Each segment has two lock values in Waze's database:
- a user lock rank and
- an automatically calculated lock rank.
There are a few rules regarding that:
1. The final, effective, lock will be whichever is higher - the user lock or the automatic lock.
2. The user lock cannot be set lower than the automatically calculated lock level.
3. The user lock cannot be set higher than the user's own level.
How Waze automatically calculate road ranks:
This is the default calculation. In each country Waze manually change some of the parameters according to:
- the community size,
- management methods,
- activity,
- map maturity,
- population and
- road network characteristics etc.
The calculation is based on weight, which is how many people have ever driven on a segment to reflect both how busy that segment is and how long it's been on our map. Waze divide all the segments in the country to half percentiles, removing some very highly weighted segments (because they significantly shift the results). So now Waze have 200 equally sized groups of segments sorted by weights. Now Waze apply the locks.
This are example parameters vary between countries:
The first, lowest 97.5% of the segments in the country - are available for everyone to edit (= no automatic lock)
98% - 98.5% - 2 cones and up
98.5% - 99% - 3 cones and up
99% - 99.5% - 4 cones and up
99.5% - 100% - 5 cones and up
The calculation process happens once in a while (~monthly) in order to update all the locks for changing conditions.