Always attach new roads to the existing network—standalone or “floating” roads are always rejected.
Contributors
@WilfriedB - Suggested change to diagram @ErmesT - Important information regarding how the approval process works
Have more tips or spot an error in my diagram/tips? Please share your feedback, and I’ll update this post and add your name into the contributor section
While the bottom part of the diagram makes perfectly sense, I would not recommend to start with drawing the entire road, but with the second step instead:
From my experience and what I did read here many times drawing a long stretch is very likely either pending for a long time or rejected. Instead, I learned to always start with a very short part.
Besides that, you should mention to start always at a road already existing on the map.
Hi @gncnpk , and thanks for the tag, @WilfriedB . A flowchart is indeed a good idea to simplify the explanation of the process of adding roads, but actually there is no evidence that following your steps a correct edit will be approved.
Our road edits go through various analyses, and often, if they’re rejected, it happens after just a few hours.
This is because the initial evaluation is performed by an AI, which assesses the correspondence between our edit and what’s seen from the satellite. This filter has become increasingly stringent in recent months, dramatically increasing the reasons why a road is rejected. Just to give some examples:
A change in the width of the roadway. In this case, it’s recommended to stop at the point where the width changes and add a subsequent edit once the first is approved.
A road that’s only partially paved, or where the background color changes. Again, it’s best to stop at the point of the change.
An excessive number of side road edits all connecting to the same main road. In this case, a very strange thing has been happening for a few months now (and has already been reported to the team): The road is added, but our edit appears as “rejected.”
If edits pass the initial screening, they are then placed on the approval list and sorted by priority.
Approval priority is primarily based on the number of users who can access our edit. Roads in densely populated areas are reviewed before those in sparsely populated areas.
If the edit isn’t reviewed within the 90-day time limit, it is rejected, not because it’s incorrect, but simply to prevent it from remaining pending for too long. Edits rejected for overtime are generally approved quickly when resubmitted.
As Wilfried pointed out, roads that are too long are often rejected, although I had one (and only one) approved that was almost 10 km long.
Another tip is to keep edits simple, starting with the main roads and adding side roads only after the main ones have been approved.
Standalone or “floating” roads are always rejected. This is one of the basic principle. However, in some countries, you may find sections of road that aren’t connected to other roads. This usually happens because the roads were added using a program, Road Mapper , which allows this feature.
Thank you so much @ErmesT! I mainly do map editing for Waze, but we also try to submit edits to Google Maps, so thank you again for sharing that information!
You are welcome, @gncnpk , and congratulations for your 84 roads in Maps.
I see that you are active on Waze, and this is helpful for Google Maps too, but the logic of approval is a bit different in Maps.
I am contributing only on Maps (98,000 roads) and Road Mapper (10.000+ km), but I think I will come and play a bit wit Waze too, to see the difference
Hey @ErmesT, if you’re on Discord, you can join us here: Waze USA, We also have a global discord server as well: Waze Global & MR We’d be glad to have you and would greatly appreciate information regarding Google Maps
Thanks for your guidance @gncnpk. My approval rate has dropped really low in recent weeks. I’ll try this advice of shorter segments to increase the chances of success.
Recently I got 26 approval emails in one day, rather than the usual 2, 3, or 4. But it isn’t easy to see if these are 26 new roads drawn using your tips, or if they are older contributions now being approved after a long time in Pending.
I’d stop before the shadow/tree, submit and wait for approval, then do one small segment over the shadow/tree and stop when it’s no longer obstructs the aerial imagery, submit and wait for approval, then repeat for each obstruction
My road edits has a ~55% success rate out of 504 road creation edits
I also found when a edit is approved, it does not necessarily mean it was added, it can actually be the opposite, I had a walking path removed after I received a “We’ve accepted your edit” email.
