Hi all, A couple of months back we established a consensus [1] that "St." in Canadian English city names should not be expanded.
I have been thinking of having the same for street names, and would like to ask people's opinions. My main motivation is St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. Every city source I could find and every street sign I saw in Mapillary says "St. Clair" or "St Clair". The TTC stations and routes are consistently "St Clair". The City uses "St. Clair Avenue West" in official documents like [2]. Geobase in Toronto has "St Clair Avenue West" , "St Clarens Avenue", and "St Helens Avenue". Currently most of the street is named "Saint Clair Avenue West/East" in OpenStreetMap, but this is changed for some parts of the road every now and then. As a local mapper I would say that "St. Clair Avenue West" is the full name. Unlike with "Av", "Ave", "W", the "St" in "St Clair" is IMO not an abbreviation. Across the Golden Horseshoe names starting with "St. " or "St " seem to be a bit more common [3] than "Saint" [4], I gather the acronym-expanders have not looked as much outside of Toronto. Would we have Ontario community consensus for a statement along the lines of: "Where "St." or "St" is normally used in the full street name, it should not be expanded to "Saint" even if pronounced so"? (I don't know what the naming conventions are in other provinces, so I focus on Ontario for now. Apologies for being Ontario-centric, but I don't know of a better venue that is Ontario-specific. I'll post links to this message in wiki talk pages for Ontario, WikiProject_Canada, and Canadian_tagging_guidelines.) As part of my checks I also looked at London UK, which I gather might be the most-intensively-mapped English-speaking city. (Recommendations for better-mapped English-speaking cities welcome). Searching for "St." in road names [5], it has street names for bigger streets like "St. John Street" and "St. Pancras Way"; [6] has name="St. Paul's Road" + not:name="Saint Paul's Road" and has had so for 5 years. Compare with searching for "Saint" [7] which also has some hits, suggesting that both can be valid depending on what is signed and used. (Or maybe it's just inconsistent.) [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Municipality_Names [2] https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2016/ey/bgrd/backgroundfile-92339.pdf [3] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1M [4] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1P [5] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/GPh [6] https://osm.org/way/230843467 [7] https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/GPi Thanks, --Jarek _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
