[Talk-ca] What do I poutine the name tag of a road with a suffix?

Mon Dec 12 01:06:15 UTC 2022

Leave it to me to start another long, long discussion... :D

I appreciate that Michael continued to do a little more research of his
own, and with a little help from third party friends-of-friends found that
what I was saying in my changeset comments was true: as written, we always
abbreviate the quadrant in a street name or address. I also appreciate that
you've gone looking for other "official" sources and have even tried to
find instances in common parlance in which we Calgarians wouldn't
abbreviate the quadrant, and come up empty. We really, truly, don't write
it out in full.

Brian happened to provide examples from the US of A to illustrate that in
said country they've made the choice to "unabbreviate" where possible, and
that's fine and dandy; it doesn't matter much to me what the nomenclature
is in Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America (although
I have been to the White House and happen to know that the street signage
quite consistently uses abbreviations, i.e. "Pennsylvania Ave NW" :P). I do
find it amusing that his other example came from Salt Lake City; a cursory
perusal of their streets using (*eeek!*) Google Streetview shows that by
and large the street signage is usually unabbreviated as-is. For example
the street signage by the Mexican Consulate at the corner of 700 South and
200 East does in fact say "700 South" and "200 East" (verbatim; majuscules,
miniscules and all). Of course no local mapper in Salt Lake objects to
this: that's how they named their streets.

I also sympathize with Minh's point about TTS systems not being able to
reliably disambiguate. That said, I do find it funny that Minh muses:

>I can't help but wonder if some of the motivation to abbreviate the street
names comes from how folks would like to see openstreetmap-carto display
them. Maybe that isn't "lying to the renderer" per se, but it is ironic,
considering that other tile layers like Mapbox Streets and OpenMapTiles
would abbreviate these quadrant suffixes anyways. Surely the tradeoff of
having to tag name:pronunciation would annoy most mappers; that key is only
designed for overrides for unavoidable edge cases.

Well Minh, if it's for the expressed purpose of making it easier for TTS
engines to synthesize spoken directions, isn't changing the name in and of
itself "tagging for the renderer"? You brought up an example from
Lethbridge, "Sometimes [a TTS engine] get[s] lucky with partially
abbreviated text, for example with '2 Avenue S' ('two avenue south')". (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/296323533) I had to laugh, I couldn't
help it: it's not "two avenue", it's SECOND avenue! :D So as much as the
"tradeoff of having to tag name:pronunciation would annoy most mappers" it
seems we're already doing this for your benefit anyway: we're just fudging
the name tag to make it (sort of) work for you. I appreciate Minh that you
deal with TTS and wayfinding for a living and have worked on as you put
"special-cased" things to work better in Canada, but by the same logic we
ought to be writing out "one hundred and sixty-second avenue southeast"
instead of "162 Avenue SE" (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/459124027).

For clarity, with respect to Martin and Pierre-Léo's comments, I do think
we should write out the street 'type'—avenue, street, road, boulevard,
crescent, circle, parkway, drive, etc.—in full. I said as much in the chain
of changeset comments Brian and Michael linked. The example I gave was
Ranchlands Crescent NW and Ranchlands Court NW. "Crescent" is abbreviated
"Cr" in the City of Calgary's official parcel addressing system (
https://www.calgary.ca/development/addressing.html), while "Court" is
abbreviated "Co", but in the Canada Post system it's "Cres" and "Crt"
respectively (which in reality is actually what's on the signage at the
streets in question). However, "Court" is also sometimes abbreviated "Ct"
in signage, which could be interpreted as either Crescent *or* Court. This
doesn't even begin to get into the potential confusion at roads with names
like Parade, Park, Parkway, Passage or Path... (Which are "officially"
abbreviated PR, PA, PY, PS and PH...)

I was going to get a start on adding to the wiki to clarify this, and lo
and behold when I took a peek at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Calgary#Road_tagging_guidelines it
reads:

"Highways that run through the city are classified as described by
Canada:Alberta#The_quick_guid
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada:Alberta#The_quick_guide>e. They
should be tagged with their street name (e.g. *highway=primary*,
*ref=1A*, *name=**Crowchild
Trail NW***)."

:)

Similarly at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Edmonton#City_of_Edmonton_guidelines:

   - To allow for expansion East and South, the city has adopted a quadrant
   naming system. Every street should have a quadrant appended to its name
   (NW, SW, etc.). Most of the city is in the NW quadrant, but newer areas of
   the city may be in other quadrants (particularly SW and NE). For
example, *23
   Avenue NW*, rather than *23 Avenue* should be used.
   - Street names should be in full, not abbreviated, to follow Canadian
   tagging guidelines
   <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Naming>.
   In other words, *109 Street NW*, rather than *109 St NW* should be used.

And this is just Alberta's two large cities; we haven't even begun to touch
on the rural addressing systems. Most rural properties in Alberta aren't
yet tagged with addresses in OSM (maybe a project someone else wants to set
up ;) ), but they tend to follow one of two systems:

1. the so-called "9-1-1 address" that uses the intersections of Range Roads
and Township Roads as a basis, e.g. the River Spirit Golf Club at 241155
Range Road 34, Rocky View County (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/681464665), or,

2. the Alberta Township Survey (ATS) system, where for example the house
located here (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/55.75384/-118.23475) is
located at SE16-78-2-6. Thats "the southeast quarter of section sixteen,
township seventy-eight, range two, west of the sixth meridian". Believe it
or not that is the only address that place has...

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 4:32 AM Michael Stark <michael60634 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello Martin,
>
> From what I can understand, and from what I've been told by a few people
> living in Calgary, the quadrant suffix as abbreviated is the name. So, if
> I'm understanding everything correctly, it would be like the "USA" in your
> "USA Avenue" example.
>
> It's also worth mentioning that I can't seem to find any official or
> common examples of the quadrant being written out. Even Wikipedia does not
> write the quadrant fully. I'll link some Wikipedia articles here.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Avenue_N
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_Calgary#Roads_and_streets
>
> I hope these examples are helpful. Let me know what you think.
>
> Warm regards,
> Michael
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
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>
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