[Talk-ca] Saints in street names in Ontario

[Kevin Farrugia]

Hi Jarek,

I agree that of the sign has a short form for saint then it should be that
way on the map too, as the sign text comes from the official records of
street names.

I think St. Is better with a period as it makes it less ambiguous to it
being an abbreviation and it may help screen readers or spoken directions
in maps provide the right information.

-------
Kevin F


On Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 12:44 PM Jarek Piórkowski <jarek at piorkowski.ca> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> A couple of months back we established a consensus [1] that "St." in
> Canadian English city names should not be expanded.
>
> I have been thinking of having the same for street names, and would
> like to ask people's opinions.
>
> My main motivation is St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. Every city source I
> could find and every street sign I saw in Mapillary says "St. Clair"
> or "St Clair". The TTC stations and routes are consistently "St
> Clair". The City uses "St. Clair Avenue West" in official documents
> like [2]. Geobase in Toronto has "St Clair Avenue West" , "St Clarens
> Avenue", and "St Helens Avenue". Currently most of the street is named
> "Saint Clair Avenue West/East" in OpenStreetMap, but this is changed
> for some parts of the road every now and then.
>
> As a local mapper I would say that "St. Clair Avenue West" is the full
> name. Unlike with "Av", "Ave", "W", the "St" in "St Clair" is IMO not
> an abbreviation.
>
> Across the Golden Horseshoe names starting with "St. " or "St " seem
> to be a bit more common [3] than "Saint" [4], I gather the
> acronym-expanders have not looked as much outside of Toronto.
>
> Would we have Ontario community consensus for a statement along the lines
> of:
> "Where "St." or "St" is normally used in the full street name, it
> should not be expanded to "Saint" even if pronounced so"?
>
> (I don't know what the naming conventions are in other provinces, so I
> focus on Ontario for now. Apologies for being Ontario-centric, but I
> don't know of a better venue that is Ontario-specific. I'll post links
> to this message in wiki talk pages for Ontario, WikiProject_Canada,
> and Canadian_tagging_guidelines.)
>
> As part of my checks I also looked at London UK, which I gather might
> be the most-intensively-mapped English-speaking city. (Recommendations
> for better-mapped English-speaking cities welcome). Searching for
> "St." in road names [5], it has street names for bigger streets like
> "St. John Street" and "St. Pancras Way"; [6] has name="St. Paul's
> Road" + not:name="Saint Paul's Road" and has had so for 5 years.
> Compare with searching for "Saint" [7] which also has some hits,
> suggesting that both can be valid depending on what is signed and
> used. (Or maybe it's just inconsistent.)
>
> [1]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Municipality_Names
> [2]
> https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2016/ey/bgrd/backgroundfile-92339.pdf
> [3] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1M
> [4] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1P
> [5] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/GPh
> [6] https://osm.org/way/230843467
> [7] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/GPi
>
> Thanks,
> --Jarek
>
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