[Talk-us] Would Like To Clean Salt Lake City Street Names

Val Kartchner val42k at gmail.com
Sun Aug 1 00:04:32 BST 2010


On Sat, 2010-07-31 at 16:34 -0600, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Mike Thompson wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Kevin Atkinson <kevin at atkinson.dhs.org> wrote:
> >>> All cities in Utah
> >>> (that I am aware of) are laid out in a grid and use grid style
> >>> addressing (I think you alluded to this in your post).  In the above
> >>> example, there is probably also a "N 900 E."  If move the "S" or
> >>> "South" (I don't want to get into the expand vs. not expanding
> >>> abbreviations here), you introduce a potential ambiguous situation.
> >>
> >> There is a North and South 900 East, but they are the same road.  North
> >> becomes South when it crosses South Template.  The only ambiguous situation
> >> is if you give an address of "333 900 E", as this has two potential
> >> locations (one North and one south of South Temple). The correct address is
> >> 333 S 900 E".  Hence, the directional prefix is more part of the address.
> >>  In additional most printed maps do not include the directional prefix.  It
> >> is only really found on online maps.
> >
> > If the road changes names when it crosses South Temple (other cities
> > in Utah use "Main" or "Central" as the dividing line), then I would
> > contend that it is a different road, at least name wise.
> 
> The road name does not really change.  The directional prefix is not 
> really part of the road name, it is not signed that way.  When someone 
> asks you what street you live on you would say "900 East" (or sometimes 
> "9th East"), you will not include the directional prefix.

In Salt Lake City, South Temple is 0 N/S and Main Street is 0 E/W.
Though the Avenues District changes the normal grid layout.

While Ogden (Utah) is laid out in a grid, it is somewhat different. In
Ogden, Wall Avenue is 100 E/W and North Street is 100 N/S.  Also, east
and south direction prefixes are assumed if none is given.  So "3725
Washington" is really "3725 South Washington Boulevard", and "350 25th"
is "350 East 25th Street".  If/when you run your script on Ogden (which
I'd like), you'll have to take this directional assumption into account.

However, we come to the problem of tagging as the street signs say (as
the wiki says with abbreviations expanded), or tagging for address
look-up (which I've only seen Cloud Made make available).  When tagging
for alternate names, do we use "name", "name_1", "name_2", "name_3",
etc, or "name", "alt_name".

Note: Some streets that I've corrected tags on legitimately have six
name tags.  For instance: "Washington Boulevard", "South Washington
Boulevard", "400 East", "South 400 East", "400 East Street", "South 400
East Street", "US-89", though the last one I've put in the "ref" tag.
(However, it would be legitimate to give an address like "3750 South
US-89" and it would get there.  When US-89 splits off from Washington
Boulevard, it is fully spelled out as "United States Highway 89".)  If
you don't want all of the variations put in some sort of "name" tag,
then develop a standard way of conveying the same information.

- Val -




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