[Tagging] Numbered streets (1st Street vs First, etc)

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 11:47 2021-01-23, Skyler Hawthorne đã viết:
> I seem to be unable to find a definitive answer for this on the wiki, 
> but is there a standardization around how to name numbered streets, 
> especially when official sources differ?
> 
> For example, the numbered streets in Rensselaer, NY here:
> 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/5618723#map=14/42.6493/-73.7317
> 
> The official data set in the NYS GIS ClearingHouse says these are called 
> "1st Street", "2nd Street", etc.:
> 
> https://gisservices.its.ny.gov/arcgis/rest/services/NYS_Streets/MapServer
> 
> However, road signs on the ground have them stylized as they are in OSM 
> with whole words.
> 
> What is the "correct" way to name these streets?

The predominant practice in the U.S. is to spell it like "North 1st 
Street". Spelling "first" as "1st" doesn't create quite as much 
ambiguity as "Dr.", "Sr.", or "St." Some places do have the numbers 
spelled out, but I suspect this is just a relic of a brief period right 
after the TIGER import when mappers saw the advice at [1] and thought it 
strictly applied to ordinals and cardinals, but it was just too pedantic 
an approach to really take off.

There are other exceptions to the general advice against abbreviations:

* The street in Manhattan is "FDR Drive", not "Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
Drive".
* The shipping store chain is "The UPS Store", not "The United Parcel 
Service Store".
* The clothier chain is "Jos. A. Bank", not "Joseph A. Bank".

The rule of thumb that I use (which the last example above possibly 
belies) is that an abbreviation/initialism/contraction should only be 
used if a text-to-speech engine would be able to pronounce the 
abbreviation/initialism/contraction correctly without having the rest of 
the name as context.

In other words, I'm pretty sure expanding "U.S.S." to "United States 
Ship" in a road name [2] would be going a bit overboard, because it 
makes routers produce less intuitive output. We might even have to add a 
name:pronunciation tag just to correct the pronunciation back to what a 
user would expect.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Abbreviations
[2] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2012-May/008185.html

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us