[Talk-GB] Made-up motorway junction names

[SK53]

Actually very rarely.

Interactions I've had with the local police indicate that they are
completely
unfamiliar with names which have been current in local usage for at least
60 years.
The occasion which comes to mind is "saying it's at the such-and-such pub
in suburb X",
but they actually wanted just the road name & the name of the road at the
nearest intersection,
because they didn't know either the pub or the suburb. Police controlrooms
these days are far
removed from the notion of the local bobby. If you can get hold of said
local bobbythey may be
more *au fait*, but as they can do only so many shifts, the chances of
having contact with someone
with local knowledge is less than 30%.

I've often thought that OSM maps in control rooms could be very useful to
help phone staff when the control staff are
covering the area of a county or larger. After all one of the purposes of
computers is to de-skill specialist knowledge,
such as local toponymy.

I appreciate there are good reasons to hold this data on OSM, but as I said
a few posts ago, and Richard says now,
the appropriate tags are loc_name and highway_authority_name. Aside from
the highway enthusiasts, iD does prompt
for a name as well.

Jerry


On Thu, 5 Jan 2023 at 18:40, Mark Goodge <mark at good-stuff.co.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 05/01/2023 18:10, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> > Mark Goodge wrote:
> >  > That's why I think that the best check, most of the time, is to see
> >  > if the local media are using the names. If they are, then that's
> >  > good evidence that their readers are using the names.
> >
> > It's not really. The Reach/Newsquest local media has devolved into a
> > knowledge-free regurgatron that basically just rewords whatever press
> > releases they're sent. In this case, they're probably going off incident
> > reports from either the local highway authority's incident desk, or the
> > local police force - both of whom are essentially highways
> > professionals, so not really a good guide to what's in general usage.
>
> On the contrary, I'd say that the police and highways professionals are
> precisely the kind of sources that are most valuable when it comes to
> colloquial names of things.
>
> Mark
>
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