[Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions

[Val Kartchner]

On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 07:42 -0700, Richard Finegold wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 04:51, Alex S. <maps at swavely.com> wrote:
> > Richard Finegold wrote:
> >> see http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/53224246 that
> >> has "West Lake Sammamish Parkway" as its base name. I'm guessing that
> >> the lack of direction prefix was a data mistake.
> >
> > East...  And no, (IMHO, anyway) it's not a data mistake, though
> > including it on West Lk Sam Pkwy
> > (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/53223662) *is* (again, IMHO).
> >  The 'East' and 'West' in this case are really part of the name.  There
> > are numerous similar examples at the other end of the same county.
> 
> Thanks for catching my mistake; at first I was going to use 53223662
> as the example, but switched.
> 
> The data mistake I attempted to refer to was Val's example of "W 3300
> S". Alas, Val didn't specify a city, but an example I found is
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/83553388; the signage might
> have "3300 S" at the intersection with S Main Street, but it'd only be
> at that intersection as a cost-saving measure, and signs naming "W
> 3300 S" for the westbound branch of that intersection and "E 3300 S"
> for eastbound would be equally valid.

I think that I specified Ogden, Utah somewhere, but it got lost
somewhere in the conversation.  The specific place that I was playing
with my Garmin routable map and the OSM routable map was along 3300 S
both sides of Midland Drive.
(http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=41.20421&lon=-112.02395&zoom=16)  The
"E Avenue" that I've also mentioned is about a mile northeast of here,
on the other side of the freeway.  The "E Street" isn't too far away,
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=41.17035&lon=-112.00271&zoom=17 here.

I think that http://vidthekid.info/misc/osm-abbr.html (that Richard
brought up) provides a pretty good summary of the issues that we've got
to deal with.  One of the most important that I see is making sure that
the core name can be separated from the rest of the entered name.  How
do we go about doing this?  We also have to be able to do this for
streets that have multiple aliases, such as "Washington Blvd" and "400
E" that I mentioned before.

What I want to have eventually is for OSM data to be able to totally
replace the functionality provided by GPS maker's data.  When I enter an
address on my Garmin, it first wants city and state (which it assumes
from my current location).  Next it want the address number.  Next it
wants the base street name (no directional prefix, suffix or
street-type).  Finally, it provides a list of complete addresses
(prefix, suffix and street-type) from which to select an address.  I
know that part of this is done by those preparing the data for the GPS,
but we need to provide the capabilities to that this can be done by a
program.

Here's my list again, modified and now ordered with the most important
stuff at the top:

1) Be useful to the user  (This is mostly done by programs)
2) Be simple for automated processing
   a) Render in an uncluttered way on the maps
   c) Look up addresses on maps
   b) Processed for GPS use
3) Be easy to enter data
   a) As simple as possible
   b) Consider above goals as higher priority

- Val -