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

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 21:18 2022-12-12, iain at monkeyface.ca 
đã viết:
> After the start of this thread I did some digging around as to the “why” 
> to see what I could come up with. As we seem to just use this and it is 
> legislated. And I think for this thread it comes down to when a cardinal 
> direction is not a cardinal direction but a name. This seems to have 
> come from a disagreement between CP rail and Saskatchewan and Alberta 
> surveyors. And the legislation was changed from a cardinal Northwest to 
> NW and should never be expanded reason being is the pattern of 
> NW-SW-NW-SW that would happen every quarter mile if you walked Alberta 
> North to South. So the cardinal system was abandoned and you just write 
> NW. This became the legal land description.

Thank you for looking into this. This reminds me of how many companies 
go by initialisms for some time, then eventually rename themselves to 
those initialisms to reflect an expanded corporate portfolio.

Unfortunately, this is a little trickier than the usual corporate 
rebranding exercise, since "NW" is apparently still read aloud as 
"northwest", retaining some connection to its directional past. Being 
from the "Midwestern" U.S., I'm quite familiar with directionals losing 
their meaning over time. But now that I know "northwest" is merely an 
idiosyncratic local pronunciation of the word "NW", I think some edits 
to Wiktionary might be in order too. At least these places haven't 
adopted redundant names like "RBC Royal Bank".

> The legislation we have in Alberta is the same as Saskatchewan and 
> Manitoba. Parts of BC also follow this but I didn’t look to closely into 
> BC. There are exceptions to these rules that are also defined in the 
> Survey Act as well as the ATS. Machine Hat was already mentioned as an 
> odd ball and they are right it is excluded. So is Fort MacMurray. Pierre 
> mention that Quebec does not abbreviate roads. And neither does the 
> French community of Beaumont in Alberta. I believe all road signs are in 
> French there. This also applies to any federal land so Indian reserves, 
> the the air ranges are out as well.

Interesting, so Medicine Hat (and Redcliff) do expand quadrant suffixes. 
Sorry I oversimplified things earlier by talking about an 
Alberta-specific exception. Would something like "10 Street SE" there 
[1] be a one-off error or a triple exception? The signs for that street 
and "10 Street Southwest" are both abbreviated, so as an armchair 
mapper, I wouldn't be able to tell.

This is just about as fragmented as the regional route shields that are 
posted in Ontario. I'm so glad the folks there were willing to adopt a 
predictable tagging format for route relations. Even if it were just 
something similar to the default_language=* key on the boundary 
relation, that would at least make the rules a little easier to sort out.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/546269094

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us