[Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-06 22:36, Val Kartchner wrote:
>...
>
>Using USPS abbreviations is the convention used by all commercial online
>mapping providers that I've seen.  (i.e.: maps.google.com,
>maps.yahoo.com, www.bing.com/maps )  I think that OSM should adopt the
>same convention.
>
>What do people think?

Yes! This has been one of those things that's been bothering me for a long 
time.

In southern California, where I live and have mapped extensively, the 
cardinal direction in front of the street name is wrong. It's not part of 
the name on the signs, on the assessor's maps, tract/parcel maps, survey 
records, local legislation, etc. My general read is that it is more 
appropriate as a suffix to the housenumber.

There are some exceptions, however:

1. Some road right-of-ways were widened and then split into two one-way 
streets to accommodate a new light-rail track down the middle. In some 
cases these streets are then named with a cardinal direction as a prefix or 
suffix. An example is Vermont Ave in Compton, which was split into Vermont 
Ave East and Vermont Ave West.

2. Another typically occurs in residential areas with roads that are 
circular. Example: West Liberty Pkwy and East Liberty Pkwy in Fontana.

Note that the direction prefix/suffix is usually perpendicular to the main 
direction of the way in these cases, whereas the housenumber suffix 
direction is normally parallel to it (i.e. North/South on a North/South 
street).

I've taken care to spell out the direction in these cases, in preparation 
for the day I could bring up this issue and hopefully get agreement to 
start stripping these prefixes away when they are not appropriate.

Unfortunately, now, someone is running a bot that is expanding all the 
suffixes, so that distinction will be lost :(

With regard to the street-type suffixes (e.g. St, Dr, Ct), I don't 
understand the reasoning behind expanding these either. As Val said, they 
are almost never spelled out on any sign, nor many types of records, 
websites, etc. Also, while it is technically a "tagging for the renderer" 
argument, I only see harm and no benefit to cluttering the rendered map 
with all those extra characters. Lastly, there are some exceptions 
(although inconceivably poorly planned) where the word may actually be part 
of the name (e.g. North Mainstreet and South Mainstreet) in Rancho Cucamonga).

I propose that it be acceptable for someone who is familiar with a 
particular area to be able to move the leading cardinal direction to 
another tag (maybe direction=*) on streets when they know it is not 
appropriate in that area and specific case. I'd also like to see the 
changesets from this expansion bot reverted so as to allow one to make the 
distinction between the special cases noted above and the ones that are 
inappropriate.


--
\Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>