Cleanup tagging and add common names of Chiang Mai Ring Roads

The limited access highways surrounding Chiang Mai have unofficial names by which they’re commonly known.

As an example, nobody I know uses either of the official names, ชม. 3029 or the tongue-twisting “Thanon Somphot Chiang Mai 700 Year,” for what is commonly known as the Middle Ring Road. I would like to add “Middle Ring Road” or alternatively, “Second Ring Road” to the tagging of that highway.

A similar situation exists for Route 121, the so called “Outer Ring Road”. Inside the city limits we usually refer to it as the “Canal Road” rather than its official name of “Klong Chonprathan Road”. Then outside of the city, Route 121 currently has neither a name:en nor an alt_name:en tag.

A separate issue concerning 121 is that IMO the name “Canal Road” should be in the “alt_name:en” tag. Instead it is in the “alt_name” tag which is, strictly speaking, incorrect for an English name of a Thai highway. An easy fix but one I wanted to discuss beforehand.

I’m looking for 3 answers from this group before I make any changes.

  1. Does anybody have any objections to the idea of adding the common names for the two “ring roads”?
  2. If no objections, which of those alternatives is best suited to go into the “name:en” and the “alt_name:en” tags?
  3. Both highways are contained in “route” relations. How best to add name tags to a portion of a route? Grab each piece and name it individually or add name tags to the relation? In my experience, names added to a relation don’t show up properly so I’m willing to tag individually if it comes to that.

Feedback please…

  1. Does anybody have any objections to the idea of adding the common names for the two “ring roads”?
  • No objections, and I think will help those who dont know road names intimately.
  1. If no objections, which of those alternatives is best suited to go into the “name:en” and the “alt_name:en” tags?
  • I would go for the former, because at least it will show on the GPS… my thinking is that it is an alternative name and that fact alone means the language is not relevant (Im sure not everyone wud agree with this).
  1. Both highways are contained in “route” relations. How best to add name tags to a portion of a route? Grab each piece and name it individually or add name tags to the relation?
  • Not really sure on this one… I mean I have never understood where the Route relations are actually used, and certainly dont see them applied in Thai consistently. Maybe just add to the relation for now & see what happens !

Well, thats my thoughts anyway. Russ

As a further thought - a lot of the Underpasses are now named … would the name of that section of tunnel/underpass take precedence over the “Middle ring road” name ?

Aside from the question of correctness, I think the “Find” function in Basecamp is practically useless. I never use it because it’s so pitiful. Are you saying that you can do a search on your GPS and/or Basecamp and actually find “Canal Road” in Chiang Mai?

I tried everything I could to find it in BC using Lambertus’ latest map and came up with only two hits, a dual carriageway in Hua Hin, both lanes of which are tagged with name=Canal Road.

I think whatever you put in the name or name:en tag for that section of the highway will be visible and findable but that might depend on which map you’re using and how the various naming rules are applied to it.

An example from my own experience. Some bridges have names. That name should properly go into a special tag bridge:name=*, Golden Gate Bridge, for example. I have a special rule in my compilation routine to process these tags. In practice most mappers don’t do things that way, they merely substitute the name of the bridge, or the name of the underpass, for that segment as though it were the name of the highway. It does show up that way but it could, I suppose, screw up routing because of the name change. I dunno.

For name tags: These should be the official non abbreviated names in thai script. Pay attention that on street signs names are often shortened due to space limitations.
If we only have an english name I suggest to put it in name as well and move it later to name:en when the Thai script is added. This gives at least some compatibility with legacy apps not fully aware of multilingual names.

alternative names go to alt_name. Similar thins with thai Script here. As no legacy software relies on them it is fine to bring them directly to alt_name:en. OSM search does usually index all of them. So nominatim for example can find it. What exactly gets indexed is an implementation detail of the application. So file a bug report there if something is broken or missing.

not certain about underpasses and bridges. they have typically names. These could also be used for guiding like “keep right to the … underpass”. On an overview map on zoom 12 I typically don’t want to read that name.
So maybe putting them in alt_name is fine as well. Think for guiding there was an additional tagging. Can’t currently check, something like “destination” if i remember right.