How does the POI owner work out what to put up on their sign?
One example of case in Brazil
[File:Addr milestone plus housenumber rs br.jpg - OpenStreetMap Wiki]
Suppose i want to go to eat here (nice place btw 
) :
You just go to Ruta 8 km 61 (Node: 4362960139 | OpenStreetMap) and the restaurant is 100-200 meters ahead,
Just good enough to find the place.
(See the date of the OSM element, October 2016)
If you are traveling in the opposite direction, just go to the milestone Km 62 and continue until you find it. If you reach Km 60 and didnât found it, you missed it 
, you need to do an u-turn and try again.
So, if I were the owner, I would do the same process, that is, how do I have to write the address so that they can find me, just âRuta 8 km 61â as it says on the card.
As said before, the precision can be hundred of meters, if may seem very low, but it anyways still useful to find the place or guide someone there, as you have to remember only two numbers, 8 and 61.
Reference posts or highway=milestone are the main indicators.
In my country it works like this=
- All major roads and most minor roads are referenced every kilometer with highway=milestone.
- This referencing is done jointly with INVIAS and the road operator.
- The highway=milestone It has the kilometer, the route and the section in which it is located recorded.
- If I have my residence on the side of the road, 300 meters from the nearest post, my address will be = km x + 300.
- It has always worked that way, from the time the first poles were placed on the road until today.
Now, who decided that km x + 300 would be the address of my home is the least of it, since this could have happened due to the electric power company, the water company or the gas company for consumption billing purposes, a courier company or simply myself I measured with a decameter the distance between my house and the nearest highway=milestone (This is what my father did with a property that belonged to him in a rural area, now it is a well-known restaurant on the side of the road and every time I pass by there I see the address both physically and in any type of advertising).
The fact is that these types of addresses exist and are common and effective in the absence of a standardized nomenclature system.
P.S. The highway=milestone (PR=Postes de Referencia) are numbered starting in a town through which the road passes and going to the next town from which the numbering begins again.
A - B ; B - C; C - D;⌠always in ascending order to the next town, interspersed on each side of the road every kilometer, so if you go in one direction and pass a post you will see the next one in 2 kilometers on the same direction of the road.
If the address is Road A - B km 31 + 500, and you go from B - A the address will be the same, the numbering does not decrease or it changes depending on the direction of the road you are going, regardless of whether only 2 kilometers have passed since you left B, the site will remain at Road A - B km 31 + 500.
This is where it is important to have the roads named in the same direction as the highway=milestone, and it is something that paid campaign mappers mapping from the other side of the planet do not understand. So you have a lot of confusion caused by good intentions, and this is where the importance of correctly mapping the highway=milestone and the direction in which their mileage increases, a reference so that good intentions do not confuse the entire road naming systemâŚ
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OK, so it is based on distance.
This might be off-topic. Iâm not sure I understand what you mean by ânamed in the same directionâ. How would I know I was naming a road in the wrong direction?
Suppose a road connects town A and town B. If the milestones are placed starting with 1 from town A, the road should be named âRoad A-Bâ. It the milestones are placed starting from B, the name should be âRoad B-Aâ.
@afgb1977 did i understood and explained well?
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Thatâs exactly how it occurs in Greece aswell. Based on which side of the road is the POI, the milestone is A-B or B-A.
For example, the same spot on the road can be 3rd km of Tokyo-Kyoto on the right side of the road, and 150th km of Kyoto-Tokyo on the left side of the road.
Yes, it is correct.
It is a small problem only visible to locals and is what I tried to indicate further back.
Not all roads in OSM are properly referenced or named. By omission, ignorance or because there is no value for ref.
What would be the name of a road that starts at A and ends at B, where A is the provincial capital or has a predominance due to population size? And there is no ref for that road.
Letâs say that for administrative purposes the road was named= (replace A, B, C, D with any real example without ref)
Road A - B
Road B - C
Road C - D
And the highway=milestone are numbered by=
A-B 1-50 km
B-C 1-25 km
C-D 1-20 km
It would not be convenient to give an address to a site like=
adrr:milestone=Road A-B km 35
if the road is named as Road B-A
It would create confusion when trying to locate oneself, whoever uses the system would wonder if something has changed.
I understand that it is not a common problem in countries with a high volume of mappers, but I find in my region names like =
Road A - B (arrived at B)
Road C - B (arrived at C)
Road D - C (arrived at D)
All this following the order A - B - C - D in my journey.
It is an unintentional error caused by different mappers who focus on one city as the origin point of the road, and in the next city there is another mapper with the same idea, and If not these two gentlemen, the author is a well-intentioned mapper on the other side of the world with comments in CS like #adt, tomtom, #kaart,âŚ
Ultimately my comment is related to the fact that if the road does not have an official ref and is named according to the place of origin and destination, the name must follow the ascending direction of the highway=milestone, that ultimately, being elements originated in an official entity, it is the one that is right regarding the name of the road, a name that appears in both local and national official entities of any order.
Again, I speak from my local knowledge, referring to my around.
P.S. I didnât want to complicate things further by talking about roads named in OSM with intermediate points between A - B.
Road A-B in administrative entities.
Road A - 1 and 1 - B in OSM.
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Be aware that nowadays the highway=milestone definition does not cover such case. Maybe another tag should be added to the highway=milestone node to describe the side of the road it refers to, maybe âdirectionâ. A proposal for improvement is needed.