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

[Tod Fitch]

> On Nov 19, 2021, at 2:22 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
> 
> By that same rationale then we should just strip the Golden State Freeway name off I 5 and set it to name="The 5”

But only for the limited portion between the San Fernando Valley and an indeterminate point some where around I-5 and California 99 split south of Bakersfield. North of that indeterminate point the use of a “the” prefix will firmly label you as an interloper from Southern California. And, for that matter California 99 is officially named “Golden State Freeway” while I-5 is then the “West Side Freeway” though I don’t know if the people in the San Joaquin Valley call CA 99 the “Golden State” or not. Further south and it will be called, interchangeably, “the 5” or one of “The Golden State”, “The Santa Ana” or “The San Diego”. Come to think of it, north of Castaic it is very commonly referred to as “the Grapevine”.

While there might be official names (e.g. “Bayshore Freeway” for US-101 between San Jose and San Francisco) it seems that in Northern California refers to highways by their numbers. And they definitely do not prepend “the” to the number.

With respect to this thread, I think there are at least a couple of distinct situations that are being conflated.

The first is for a typical US freeway which usually has no names posted on it. I think we really ought to use noname=yes when there is no signed name. Fortunately, at least from a mail and parcel delivery point of view, there are no addr:street=* values along any freeway so we are mostly looking at route guidance tagging and we have the “destination=*” tag that can be used based on signage on the on ramps for that (e.g. “I-5 North, Sacramento”).

The second for other highways. In the case of the non-freeway highways there will be cross roads and at those cross roads there will usually be signs and we can use what is on those signs for the name. Unfortunately, I have seen places where one signs says one thing and the next sign says something else and the question arises where did the name change? Or alternate signs say one thing and the ones between say something else, do we dual name? But that will have to be done on a case by case basis with local surveys.




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