[Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions

[Lord-Castillo, Brett]

I always go with my classic example (which all of the major online map services currently render incorrectly):
North Outer 40 Road (which runs adjacent to and parallel to interstate 64).

The name of the road is "North Outer 40". The type is "Road".
It is named this because Interstate 64 used to be US Highway 40, and the road was set up to run parallel to Highway 40 on both side of the highway when it was a highway. The highway is now an interstate, but the reference to "40" was kept (so "Forty" is incorrect and it is not an address number).
The road runs east-west mostly, but also runs north-south for an extensive stretch. South Outer 40 Rd runs alongside the south side of the interstate.

As for parsing type, I've always liked the street that our EOC is on (see below). Depending on which part of the address you get, you might think the street type was "Dr", "Xing", "Blfs" or even the ever popular "Xing Dr". But another good one close to us is "Old Olive Street Rd" and "Old Olive St Rd" (both official names for different sections of the road). These two streets run parallel to Olive St, Olive Street Rd, and Olive Blvd (all three of these are different roads).

If you have street name by itself and full name, then I could see possibly deriving all of these correctly. The problem comes when people interpret the street name incorrectly (e.g. "North Outer 40", "Outer 40", "40", "Outer", "North Outer"; "Ladue", "Ladue Bluffs", "Ladue Bluffs Crossing"; "Olive", "Olive Street", "Olive St", "Old Olive", "Old Olive St", "Old Olive Street".
Not sure if four separate fields will create more data entry errors, or will create more attention to detail.

Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400
Fax: 314-628-5508
Direct: 314-628-5407



-----Original Message-----
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 13:16:22 -0700
From: Richard Finegold <goldfndr+osm at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Street Naming Conventions
To: val42k at gmail.com
Cc: OSM Talk US <talk-us at openstreetmap.org>
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On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 20:18, Val Kartchner <val42k at gmail.com> wrote:
> This topic has been dropped without it having been resolved. ?We still
> need some way of addressing the issues summarized in
> "http://vidthekid.info/misc/osm-abbr.html". ?This can be summarized as
> needing to create fields for:
>
> ?direction prefix
> ?street name
> ?street type
> ?direction suffix
>
> This is needed for exactly the same reason that no abbreviations are
> supposed to be used in OSM: There is no automated way to fix the parts
> of a street name.
>
> For instance, here are some actual addresses which occur in this area:
>
> ?Number ?Prefix ?Street Name ? ? ? ? ?Type ? ?Suffix
> ?200 ? ? West ? ?North Temple ? ? ? ? Street
> ?200 ? ? East ? ?South Temple ? ? ? ? Street
> ?200 ? ? North ? West Temple ? ? ? ? ?Street
> ?50 ? ? ?East ? ?North Lakeview ? ? ? Drive
> ?50 ? ? ?East ? ?South Lakeview ? ? ? Drive
> ?2450 ? ?North ? E ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Street
> ?300 ? ? ? ? ? ? Southgate ? ? ? ? ? ?Drive
> ?4700 ? ?West ? ?3300 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Street ?South
>
> These are just samples, but others on this list have come up with other
> examples that demonstrate the problems with the current way of doing
> things. ?Also, in the last example given above, the "Type" and "Suffix"
> would be swapped, but in most written addresses the "Type" would be
> dropped.

I'll again claim that just one field would be enough -- the street
name -- and the other three can be derived from their offsets; trivial
for direction prefix, and slightly more complicated (requiring a
dictionary/list of directions, anything left over goes into the street
type field) for the latter two.

Can you offer any examples where these three would be difficult to
derive if one was provided only full name and street name?