[Talk-us] Name tag on unnamed, but numbered routes

[stevea]

This is from someone who has lived in and driven in both southern and northern California for decades (and double-majored in Applied Linguistics from the University of California).

It's actually a linguistic curiosity of "Southern California English dialect" that people in and around Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange (sometimes San Diego) Counties — the very definition of "Southern California" — put the word "the" in front of a number representing a freeway / highway ("The 5" or "The 91," an Interstate number and a state route number, respectively).

There is also a tendency (especially in radio traffic reports) to say a common "name" for a freeway / highway (like "Golden State Freeway" for I-5 or "San Gabriel Freeway" for I-605) and these often get a "The" preceding them; BOTH of these tendencies (a prefixed "The" and "Name as often as number") are quintessentially SOUTHERN California "dialect."

(SNL has great fun parodying this Southern California-ism on their sketch comedy "The Californians").

To people from Northern California, BOTH putting "The" as a prefix AND using a freeway "name" instead of the number sounds odd (like "whad're you from LA or SoCal?!").  We DO have "freeway names" around here, like a segment of Highway 1 / Coastal Highway in Santa Cruz County is called "Cabrillo Highway" and ON RARE occasion, you'll hear someone say "take Cabrillo Highway South..." instead of "take Highway 1 South..."; this still sounds a bit weird to NorCal ears, though it isn't technically "wrong."  And in Northern California you'd NEVER (well, virtually never) hear "take THE 1 South..." as that is whack and makes you sound like you're from SoCal.  Say "take 1 South" or if you MUST, say "take Highway 1 South."

Additionally, there is a segment of "Cabrillo Highway" (Highway 1) in Santa Cruz County which is ALSO (?) named "A. Donald Hoover Memorial Freeway."  Since August 2013, the northbound lane of Highway 1 near Park Avenue and the southbound lane near the La Fonda Avenue Bridge (Santa Cruz) has this name (in OSM official_name=*) and we wouldn't want this to be in the name=* tag as then you'd get (as Minh once warned me about) your OSM-data-based satnav voice taking waaaaaaaay to long to say "A. Donald Hoover Memorial Freeway" instead of the much-shorter "Highway 1" (or even "Cabrillo Highway," though I wonder if the text-to-voice would correctly make the Spanish double-ell sound like a "y" as in "Cabri-yo" instead of "Cabrilo" — like a Brillo pad).

We have name=*, official_name=*, short_name=*, loc_name=*...let's use these as they are documented, and eventually we'll get end-users (use cases, routers, sat-nav voices...) using them correctly.

Eventually.

In the meantime, please be aware there really are (minor, even among we who speak English) linguistic differences here across over a thousand kilometers from Mexico to Oregon.  California has about 40 million people and we are vastly diverse.  I'd say it's pretty safe to say similar things happen in other places in the USA, at least from region to region.