Use of 'Districts' in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, instead of Suburbs

Communities Oceania
1

Hi Everyone,

I’m new to this forum, but I’ve used OpenStreetMap for a while now on my GPS. One thing that has given me trouble is the use of “districts”, instead of suburbs. Whilst districts exist in Canberra, they are not included in addresses. trying to navigate using OpenStreetMap in Canberra is quite difficult, as one needs to guess what district a suburb has been categorised into, and then put that into the address.

From reading before making this post, any data used to update or inform OpenStreetMap has to be under a Creative Commons licence. Unless I am mistaken This Commonwealth DISR data is available under a Creative Commons licence, and could be used to update Canberra to be fare more usable. I don’t have any knowledge about editing maps in OpenStreetMap, but would happily put in the research and effort if it is likely that this would improve the Canberra Map.

Alternately, could the district system be entirely replaced with just ‘Canberra’. The ACT Government avoids using duplicate street names ([https://www.legislation.act.gov.au/View/ni/2021-72/current/html/2021-72.html](https://Public Place Names (Naming of public places) Guidelines 2021)), so there would not need to any further discriminating information beyond Canberra in an address.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on this topic?

2

Assuming we’re talking about a Garmin map here, that sounds like a decision made by whoever created the map that you’re using? Suburbs appear well mapped in Canberra, so I’d have thought that you could just create a map using “suburb” wherever “district” is used now?

3

Hi,

Yeah, actually, when I wrote this I didn’t see it displayed both. My mistake. I’ll look into fixing how Garmin interprets addresses. Thanks for the reply and sorry for not looking further first before posting.