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

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 5:14 PM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> 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).
>

It's only unambiguous literally from Caltrans going well out of it's way to
avoid duplicate route numbers in the Interstate, US and State systems, too,
except in rare cases where one is an unfunded extension of another (CA 110
comes to mind offhand, since it's contiguous with California's I 110 past
where I 110 ends).  What shape and color the shield happens to be is nearly
entirely irrelevant in California (though numerous edge cases exist at the
county and especially the national forest network levels, thanks to each
county and national forest having it's own network unrelated to anything
Caltrans has more than outer periphery oversight for, something that
*mostly* doesn't come up unless you're trying to follow Route 66 or you're
near the boundary between Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests, and
by that point you're so deep into the contextual weeds only folks who even
care those roads exist in the first place know the difference and will pick
up on it anyway).


> 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).
>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my recollection is that Caltrans, like
Oregon's ODOT, goes out of its way to only honorifically rename stuff using
brown signs, not completely rename a road after a random highway worker who
got hip checked by a truck after them overnight by state law obligation, or
a soldier who died and whose family has the ear of a politician looking for
cheap political capital.  In which case thank whatever godlike entity you
thank that you're living someplace that actually thinks about things like
"is this going to confuse everyone", "can we actually afford/is it
practical to put 15 words on a street sign at every intersection", and "do
we already have other roads with substantially similar names crossing the
road we want to rename" as basic questions first (neighborhoods immediately
in my vicinity have two, unrelated, bridges on opposite sides of downtown
named identically after Martin Luther King, Jr, differentiated only by
context by which one is on Cincinnatti Avenue; and a Martin Luther King,
Jr. Boulevard intersecting Martin Luther King, Jr. Expressway, making for
an interchange that literally only makes sense by context of street vs
freeway).


> 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.
>

I'm not sure linguistic is the only problem, since political zeal insisting
on making pretty much anyone a demagogue worthy of a highway rename
conflicting with budgetary limits is a factor as well.
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