Street Names Not Found in Palm Harbor, Florida

I just downloaded and installed the latest “gmapsupp.img” file from OpenMapChest.org onto my Garmin Nuvi 40. The device “sees” the map fine, but almost all of the streets come up with “no matches found”. Here are a few examples of valid addresses in Palm Harbor, Florida, whose street names come up with “no matches found” (You can verify that these are valid addresses on Zillow.com):

1656 Bentley (Bentley Court)
477 Old Oak (Old Oak Circle)
2004 Swan (Swan Lane)
711 Samantha (Samantha Drive)

These are not some remote or obscure locations. Pinellas County is the most densely populated county in Florida, and all of these streets are in heavily populated residential neighborhoods.

I realize that this forum is not directly tied to the OpenMapChest web site, but that site has no help page or forums or feedback options of any kind. Supposedly, he is building the img files from information he garnered from Open Street Map. Has anyone else had this problem? The map itself looks fine on my device. In fact, I can “zoom in” and find each and every one of these “no matches found” streets, shown correctly on the map by name. So what gives? I know enough not to include street names suffixes, so that’s not the problem.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Did you try those addresses on osm.org ? If they can be found there, there is something wrong with the method OpenMapChest produces Garmin maps. You can always download alternative maps from e.g. http://extract.bbbike.org/ and see whether they work properly.

I am wondering whether you need to download so-called “routable” versions of Garmin maps to make the addresses searchable.

Okay, I tried doing a search of my example addresses directly on the openstreetmap.org web site, and MOST of them are still not found. The only one that IS found is 477 Old Oak Circle, and ONLY when I included the suffix “circle” (or “cir”) in the search. “477 Old Oak, Palm Harbor, FL” returns no results.

The odd thing is that all of these streets names are clearly visible on the OSM map itself, so why can’t they be found with a straight forward search? Take 2004 Swan Lane in Palm Harbor, for example. It doesn’t matter if I type “Swan, Palm Harbor, FL” or “Swan Lane, Palm Harbor, FL”, or “Swan Ln, Palm Harbor, FL” or “2004 Swan Lane, Palm Harbor, FL” or “2004 Swan, Palm Harbor, FL”, all of these return no results. But if I type something MORE obscure like “Cobble, Palm Harbor, FL”, OSM finds it fine. As I said, I can zoom in on the map and find Swan Lane displayed as it should be. So why doesn’t the search feature find it? Also, you can check this address on Zillow.com and see that it is a perfectly normal street in a densely populated area of Florida. I would say this is a HUGE flaw in the whole Open Street Mas project. In fact, for my purposes, it renders the maps completely useless.

In any event, I appreciate your response to my question. I guess it won’t do me any good to download the file from another web site. If anyone has any idea what’s wrong here, and how I might correct it, please let me know. Thank you, again.

When searching on osm.org itself, “Old Oak Circle, Florida” works for me; it finds a couple, one of which is http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/11243817 which is presumably the one that you want. If you want more detail about searching try http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org - there you can click “details” to find out more about how something was found.

The way that Americans give directions sounds very odd to European ears. In this case “old oak cir, florida” also works (so Nominatim is expanding “cir” to “circle”, but if you miss the second part of the road name out altogether (“477 Old Oak, FL”) it doesn’t find it though.

However, what Nominatim finds has no bearing on what your Garmin finds. Maybe ask on the talk-us mailing list - people there will be familiar with the way that US-style searches tend to be done and may be able to advise what to do?

OK, the addresses are in OSM. If you look for “2004 Swan Lane, Pinellas County” you will find the street.
It does not know it is part of Palm Harbor though. This is probably the case for the other addresses as well.

Two possible reasons:

  • Addresses use bad Tiger data (indicator is that there is no address node where the house is supposed to be)
  • We only have a node for Palm Harbor and not an area, in which case it is pretty hard to know to which town/neigborhood/… the street belongs

Solutions for both problems: map them :slight_smile:

This problem with OSM mainly exists in the US (and less in Europe), because, due to lack of properly mapped addresses, Nominatim relies on Tiger data. I have no idea what the Garmin map uses here. I doubt it falls back on Tiger data. So it is very well possible the address is not in the data used by your Garmin map.

“SomeoneElse” and “escada”, thank you for your replies. It is starting to make more sense now, and I appreciate your taking the time to explain things to a newbie like me. I was out of town for a few days, so I apologize for the delay in responding. Thank you, again, and Merry Christmas!