[OSM-talk] Rendering street names across several ways

[Simon Biber]

"zverik at textual.ru" <zverik at textual.ru> wrote:
> Those names are not rendered, obviously, because most streets consist of
> several 
ways, due to routing and public transport reasons.

Hmm, what routing reasons? The only cases where streets need to be split into multiple ways, in my experience, is where the tagging changes or a junction=roundabout intervenes.

However, in your example area, many of the streets are divided into what seems like an unnecessarily large number of ways. If the tagging doesn't change between adjacent ways, then shouldn't the ways be merged into a single way?

For example, on Малый проспект В.О. (Maliy Avenue of V.I.) the following consecutive ways all have exactly the same tags:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/31374333
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/31395443
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/29043983
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/31387923
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/31400577
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/36738855
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/31893349
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/60948948

Can you or someone else explain why the street was mapped using so many ways?

The next way along the same street,
  http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/35497072
has the tag railway:tram added so it's correct to be split at the node,
  http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/308322656

Regards,
Simon.