Names are not refs vs some names are based on refs

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@ZeLonewolf

But on this topic there seem to be two positions:

1. Ref information should never be repeated in way names
2. Ref can be repeated (e.g. name=State Route 123) in situations where waves hands frantically the route name in that form is waves hands frantically used locally.

I’m of the opinion that a street name can be utterly boring. It can contain a letter or a number. It can even be predictable, like “West 22nd Street” running between 21st and 23rd, or “Alley 8” two half-blocks away from Alleys 7 and 9. But neither 22nd nor 8 is a “ref”, that made-up word that mappers toss around as if it’s a noun. More precisely, neither 22nd nor 8 is a route number. A moniker like “State Route 123” can function as a name in some contexts, but in others, it’s just another representation of the route number, which is already adequately tagged on the route relation and redundantly on the way.

Unlike a lot of American GIS and addressing systems, we keep the whole street name together as one unstructured unit of information, even though breaking it up into “West”, “22nd”, and “Street” would facilitate more reliable abbreviations and such. But we do represent route numbers as structured data in network, ref, and direction. I guess we care more about being able to render than “West 22^nd St.”.

Some use cases like navigation and geocoding really need to be able to come up with the spelled-out representation or an abbreviation, but it isn’t easy because every route network has different rules. Some route networks have a different rule depending on the jurisdiction. (Is it a “U.S. Route” or a “U.S. Highway”? Is it “CR”, “CH”, “CTH”, “Co.”, or “C”?) Compiling a comprehensive set of these rules is akin to the OSM Americana project’s effort to design a shield for each network. Many rules are already stored in Wikidata for data consumers to ingest automatically, without us needing to manually tag individual routes in various languages. But many local networks are still missing, so those who feel strongly about keeping systematic names off route relations might consider contributing to Wikidata’s coverage of those name formatters.

@ZeLonewolf

Examining position 2, what I would want to know is whether that name is computable using a consistent and well-determined method knowing only route and network information. In other words, would every way associated with a route get the same name format? Is that format used consistently or are there differences based on whims?

I appreciate @Baloo_Uriza’s position as a rule of thumb for most route systems in most of the country. OSM’s status quo is a lot cleaner than TIGER’s for this reason, even if it shatters Nominatim’s assumption that an addr:street=* must always match the name=* of a nearby street – or else the address doesn’t exist and all bets are off for routing. However, I don’t like to formulate it as a universal truth, because there’s nothing stopping a local authority from munching on some before foisting something more idiosyncratic upon the traveling public.

The U.S. Route 22 / State Route 3 concurrency in Warren County, Ohio, is officially “West United States 22 and 3” or “East United States 22 and 3” and appears that way in most GIS and addressing systems. On the ground, street signs posted by the county used to consistently give this idiosyncratic name, but more recently, townships and developers have posted signs that call it anything from “State Route 22/3” to “U.S. Rt. 22 & S.R. 3” (there was a surplus of periods one year) to “Montgomery Rd.” (the name of the road in a different county). I’ve mapped the signs and also tagged these idiosyncratic names in alt_name=*, because while I think this is interesting information, inconsistent software behavior may cause more confusion than it’s worth.

On the other hand, directionals are usually pretty important in the counties and cities that use them. Just as mail addressed to West 5th Street shouldn’t go to East 5th Street, there is a difference between northbound North Interstate Highway 35 and northbound South Interstate Highway 35 in navigation and geocoding. It may not be the determining factor in getting lost if you’re using turn-by-turn navigation, but that shouldn’t be a requirement for adding signposted detail to the map.

@NE2 already inflicted enough dataloss by removing quadrant directionals from street names in sweeping edits.^[1] Hundreds of streets were affected in Ohio alone, maybe more if anyone has already started removing tiger:name_direction_suffix=* too. If another mass edit removing name=* from ways is under consideration, then I may need to trot out a longer parade of horribles.

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1. Heh, this road becomes “East South Street” inside corporation limits. ↩︎