[Talk-us] 'Honorary' street name conflicts with posted name - how to decide

Paul Johnson baloo at ursamundi.org
Tue May 24 20:00:10 UTC 2016


On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> wrote:

> Salt Lake City just renamed a part of 900 South to ‘Harvey Milk
> Boulevard’. This is a so-called ‘honorary designation’. But now I see a
> conflict.
>
> 1) The common tagging practice is that posted names rule. The signs
> changed to show the new honorary name:
> https://goo.gl/photos/xqAxQCwCmPRUGWkm9 . So that would suggest I change
> the name to ‘Harvey Milk Boulevard’ and demote ‘900 South’ to name_1 or
> loc_name.
>

old_name=900 South would be how I'd tag that situation.

I get to deal with this a lot since this comes up *very* frequently on
Oklahoma highways, thanks to legislative fiat renaming a highway after
something or someone, then forgetting they named that section after another
thing already and renaming part of it again.  State Highway 51 was named
after the Rainbow Division, then chunks of that got renamed again for other
things (like the city of Broken Arrow in the city of Tulsa east of downtown
as well as Broken Arrow itself), only to get renamed a third time within
just Broken Arrow itself for disabled american veterans.  This hits
ultimate lunacy now, since a 2013 law passed by legislature automatically
renames the one-mile segment they were killed on for any state employee
struck by a vehicle on the job, and since it was "emergency legislation",
it takes effect immediately to be posted as soon as possible, without
further public input or hearing.  This has happened at least four times
within an hour's drive of me since the law went on the books now; as a
result, verifying names is often ambiguous and nearly impossible without
checking the state record.

The upswing to this is, given enough time, every last part of the state
highway system will have a paper trail for names, much the way every
publicly maintained roadway in Oregon (and I do mean literally, and not
figuratively, but an exhaustively comprehensive every, down to ocean
beaches open to motorists) has it's speed limit published by the state and
queryable for free from an online database.  The downside is this naming
scheme is likely to be more fractured than Oregon's speed limits...


> 2) Addressing and geocoding. People will continue to refer to this street
> as 900 South. Official addresses will not change. That would suggest that I
> leave the name=900 South in place and add name_1=Harvey Milk Boulevard.
>

This versus the old_name=* alternative can cause edge case multilingual
issues (though granted, in the American west, this is probably only likely
in places where there's an equally valid city, county, state or tribal
name).  I would go with name=Harvey Milk Boulevard, old_name=900 South.

That said, if your municipality is kind enough to provide a color scheme
for naming signs to glean extra information from (relevant in Tulsa City
being that a green street name sign indicates it's publicly owned by the
state, Tulsa City or the county and is open to the public; blue inside
Tulsa City limits means it's a secondary, honorific name, usually seen
downtown ("Avenue of the Americas" on Main Street, or various Tulsa
Community College figures around TCC campuses, for instance) and sometimes
for limited periods of time (Thunder Rolls Ave for a Garth Brooks concert
for example).  Then something like name=South Main Street, alt_name=Avenue
of the Americas would apply.

I can often come up with tagging before I can actually tag it,
though...usually have more ideas for mapping and come up with more
as-yet-unmapped observations than I have time to map myself, which is why I
gotta be quite high on the open note count relative to almost anyone else
at this point...
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