Road names being changed to "official" names only used in government databases

Communities United States
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There is a user changing most of the street names in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I believe his changes are in opposition to the principle of Map What’s on the Ground, listed in the wiki page on good mapping practices. I have already had some discussion with this user on one of his change sets (Changeset 157320638), but he apparently doesn’t agree with me. I don’t think there is anyone else who routinely maps the Tulsa area, and there is no written guidance for Oklahoma on the wiki, so I want to open the question to the community at large.

How Tulsa roads have always been labeled
Of course there are exceptions, but as a general rule, north-south roads within Tulsa are called “avenues” and east-west ones are called “streets.” In most areas of the city there are 10 blocks per mile traveling north-south, and 16 blocks per mile traveling east-west. Wherever roads are more closely spaced than that, they share a name with the second one being “Place” instead of “Street” or “Avenue.”

Near the downtown area, all the roads are named (instead of numbered) except for east-west streets on the south side, which are numbered from 1st Street on up all the way south out of town and on into adjacent jurisdictions. Going any other direction out of downtown (east, west, or north), eventually the named streets end and numbered ones take over from that point.

Like most cities, Tulsa has direction prefixes and suffixes for all the streets. In Tulsa’s case, the suffixes are generally omitted. Direction suffixes are not used on any named streets, and are also not used on the numbered east-west streets in the south side of the city (except once you get far enough out, other jurisdictions start to use the suffix while still keeping the same general naming scheme). On the north side, direction suffixes are used, to distinguish these streets from the ones with the same name (number) on the south side.

For Avenues, again the direction suffixes are not used on the named ones, but once you get out to where the numbered ones start, the direction suffix is used, but the order is traditionally changed around so you say “South 72nd East Avenue” instead of “South 72nd Avenue East.”

This convention has always been widely used throughout the city on street signs (notwithstanding a minority of signs that have incorrect information), and has always been and is still used on other maps, and is the preferred naming scheme used by the USPS for mail delivery within Tulsa.

How a rogue user is changing the majority of Tulsa’s road names:
Basically, the direction suffixes are always used within the official county land records and the city/state E911 system, without switching the order of the words for the numbered north-south roads. And this user I have the argument with is taking all those names that I would consider to be an official_name and applying them to the name field throughout the city. His best argument for this is that the official name source is the most consistent. But in fact, such official names are not the names that generally appear on street signs, other maps, or even in the usual full addresses of houses and buildings.

Worth noting, I had a similar argument with the same user a few years ago over highway names, but I let him have his way with that. This time, I’m not going to just stand by and let him change all the street names in the city! Immediately after posting this, I’m going to go back to the conversation I already had with him and letting him know I’m continuing the conversation here.

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To whoever is adding these names (and will be invited here): where this names are used? Only in that government database?

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There’s a previous thread about street directionals so I’ll just link to my thoughts over there. Should Street Names include the Direction? - #6 by watmildon

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In the thread you linked, you said

Some folks seem very insistent that if the sign doesn’t have a directional then OSM shouldn’t and I think that is a pretty narrow view of what OSM can be.

I’m not looking at individual street signs in Tulsa, I’m looking at the overall pattern of how the roads are generally signed/labeled. This also matches up with:

  • how paper maps have been made for decades or a century
  • how addresses usually appear on business web sites
  • how online mapping services usually display the road names
  • how the post office wants mail addressed
  • how TIGER usually has the roads named

I think altogether this creates a strong argument for not including the directional suffixes through most of Tulsa, as outlined in my original post. Or including them only in a full_name or official_name tag.

For a similar example of another place where one directional is routinely omitted, see Utah/Naming Conventions - OpenStreetMap Wiki. In the Utah area it’s the prefix that is usually omitted instead of the suffix, and omitting this in the name tag has caused other problems as outlined in the talk page for that wiki page. Those concerns are not relevant in Tulsa where we omit the suffix rather than the prefix.

If you look at the history for the Utah Naming Conventions page, it shows it’s not just one user saying to omit a directional from road names. Four users have edited this wiki page, with one of them referencing other discussion on a slack group. To me, this shows a consensus of Utah users who want to see the name of their local roads reflect the shortened name that has always been used on street signs, instead of the full official name. That’s the same thing I want for Tulsa, but in Tulsa the case is even stronger because the directional suffixes are omitted not only from the street signs, but also the postal addresses.

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You can always start a discussion with “local” mappers about what the consensus should be and document it on the wiki. It will be good to get more input from Oklahoma mappers than just yourself and @Baloo_Uriza but it’s not un-achievable.

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OK, over the next few weeks I will try to make contact with more people who have edited locally. I am unaware if there are many who are very active, but I didn’t spend any time looking yet.

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I am happy to cross post things to various places (the slack, discord etc). LMK.

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I have never joined the slack or discord groups for OSM. I don’t even have Discord installed on the primary computer I now use. So it would be helpful if you could cross-post this there and also let me know if there are groups on there that I should join.

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The global OSM Discord server has a us-canada channel and there are state channels in the OSM-US Slack. Happy to send folks to a thread here on the Community forum.

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I laughed at this. There is definitely at least one prominent mapper who routinely maps the Tulsa area.

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Yeah, Hi, yes, it’s apparently me, the rogue mapper that’s apparently gone rogue by being completionist… so I’m going to just say, I’m not dying on this molehill. This is something that can be solved by a perl one-liner one way or another.

I can’t think of anything to add that hasn’t already been said. Just seems weird we’re singling out Tulsa then for having overly complete names. The only thing that stands out about Tulsa is the signage is generally so bad and inconsistent that locals can take any major intersection and know it by the most obvious thing that isn’t on this list. Go to any other major city with active mappers and there’s correct prefix and suffixes even though nobody’s going to barf out the whole formal name every time, and data consumers that think that’s too formal can comb that off on their own, as Mapbox (among others) has shown us. What makes us different?

Ultimately, I don’t care that much. Neither does nearly anybody else or anybody would actually bother stamping out some consistent and correct signage around here.

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I’ll write a more detailed reply when I get off from work this evening, but generally I’m thinking the road names can wait until we get a greater number of local mappers in on the conversation. I feel strongly about this, but I see that there are several people on the forum here who agree more with you than with me.

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I recommend sticking with the authoritative government road names in the name field and then putting a shortened, local or alternate name in those tags.

Adding the NG911 name helps with address matching and for harmonization with other datasets. If signage does not match these due to them being outdated or perhaps a poorly funded DOT (as is the case in my area), the signage could one day catch up.

As an example of how it is ok for OSM to differ slightly from what is on the ground, street name signs in my area use all caps and abbreviate the directional and street types. A street near me is “South Linwood Avenue”. If we take the rule literally, then the OSM name can be none other than S LINWOOD AV (with no E). You would be hard pressed to find any official database in Baltimore that would tell you whether the road is Linwood or LinWood because they store the official names in ALL CAPS. So we are taking a bit of a leap to apply proper casing.

My point is that the official database and what is sign posted can differ slightly. Use the alt_name or another tag for others. Contact your local government if their data is wrong.

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In Tulsa, It’s not outdated signs or a poorly funded DOT, it’s a conscious decision by city leaders to omit the direction suffix or switch the word order in certain cases, as listed in my first message. Signs and street addresses match local customary names, which differ from the official full names in the county land records and other specific government databases.

I’m not arguing over capitalization differences: I agree that we should not use abbrevations and all caps in OSM even though the street signs have it that way. I am saying that in this city where customary names for streets have certain differences from the official names, and those differences are purposefully applied to all street signs and preferred street addresses of properties, then we should reflect the same customary names as name in OSM, because those are the most commonly used names in most cases. Only in cases where someone is working directly from a land records or similar database would they see the full official name.

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There’s not much else I really want to say right now. I’ll take the next few days and look at how things are done in other cities in the US, and wait and see if anyone else local to Tulsa has an opinion on this. I don’t think street signs in Tulsa are overall as badly done as you suggest. Yes, there are a few errors scattered everywhere, and some neighborhoods with more of them, but there are also areas of Tulsa where almost all the street signs are correct according to the standard format they use, which is different from the official names as explained in my first post. I just today asked them to replace the missing street sign at East 61st Street South and South 116th Avenue East (official names). When it is done, if they’re paying attention to doing it correctly the way they normally do, I expect it will say “E 61ST ST” and “S 116TH E AVE,” the customary names that are most widely used around here instead of the official names.

I would ask that you enter street addresses of buildings into OSM using the customary names instead of the official ones, since we both know that’s how the USPS likes them (even if we also know we’re not supposed to use the USPS address database as a source for OSM). For the names of the streets themselves in OSM, I will wait for other local Tulsa mappers to give their opinion.

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It sounds to me like the customary names (without suffix) should go in name and the official names from the government dataset should go in official_name.

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I did some cursory looking, and I did see instances where the full suffix was present, as well as some where the suffix was not present. I did not have to look long to find this example, at this location:
image

Suffice to say, if the prefix and suffix is appearing on signs, it seems quite correct to write “East 15th Street South” for the road depicted on this sign. That’s consistent with how it’s done in other cities with this type of nomenclature.

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As a meta-note, while @Baloo_Uriza has certainly been involved in mapping controversies since before I could spell OSM, it would appear in this case that his mapping practices are not obviously unreasonable. Certainly, describing someone as a “rogue user” is really not acceptable discourse. We can all disagree on mapping and tagging, but I would ask that you keep the conversation civil and on-topic to the question.

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To add the directional suffix on the end of a numbered street on the south side of the city is not a drastic change, and indeed it is done routinely by several other jurisdictions as you get further away from Tulsa itself. I have less argument with that than the other changes:

  • Adding the suffix on roads that have a name instead of a number.
  • Changing “East Avenue” or “West Avenue” to “Avenue East” or “Avenue West.”

I believe you would have a much harder time finding a street sign that has either of those two things done, although I think some very small minority of probably are done that way.

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Agreed. The name calling was wrong and disrespectful of me.

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