On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Mike Thompson <miketh...@gmail.com> wrote: > You have caused me to do some real thinking and digging on this > subject. I think this debate is good, and will lead to better OSM > data in the long run. > > If official local government sources use pre-directionals, this is > very strong indication that they should be part of the name. The > Franklin County Ohio (where Columbus is located) Highway engineer > includes directions in some cases on their maps. Note "E. North > Broadway" and "W. North Broadway" on the following map: > http://www.fceo.co.franklin.oh.us/Map-Atlas%20Pages/map_19.PDF, but > not all. Note "W Broad St" in this map from the same source: > http://www.fceo.co.franklin.oh.us/Map-Atlas%20Pages/map_27.PDF. Also, > the Franklin County Auditor often uses directionals in their property > database, although not consistently.
Holy crap, that map is available online??? I've grown up with that map, and I've probably seen just about every grid square of every edition since the early 90's, but I never knew it was online! Anyway... I can definitely offer some relevant information. First of all, that map isn't actually produced by FCEO. The paper editions have for several years said "Copyright Seeger Map Company". The data comes primarily from Franklin County Auditor's GIS, I believe. Seeger supplies the exact same map to AAA with different colors (the most significant differences being the line colors of freeways, and swapped background colors for Columbus and unincorporated Franklin County). Seeger is not local; they are based in Wisconsin, and I have seen their name on a AAA map of Sevier County, TN which was not up to the quality I've come to expect from their Franklin County maps. Now let's take a look at that map. That page 19 is a good place to start. Yes, North Broadway appears with directional prefixes. So does Woodruff Ave, at least on its W half. But none of the other east-west streets on that page are shown with directional-prefixes. As you may have guessed from TIGER, *every* east-west street that crosses High St actually has a directional prefix. Seeger omits most of them, so that could be an argument in favor of leaving them out of OSM street names; on the other hand, Seeger isn't entirely consistent about it, so that could be an argument that the map isn't credible evidence for either case. Now let's move on to matters of signage. The City of Columbus is extremely consistent with its street signs. They are all-uppercase FHWA Series C or D; occasionally Series B might be used for very long names. (I know of a single instance of mixed-case Clearview, and several in mixed-case Helvetica that were apparently part of a multi-jurisdictional experiment, but I digress...) Street signs in Columbus are always white on green, except a few on OSU campus that are white on red. Columbus tends to display one street name on each corner of a 4-way intersection, so the name of the cross-street can be seen on the near-right or far-left corner. Information displayed on a City of Columbus street sign is as follows: [dir. prefix*] [core name] [type suffix*] [dir. suffix*]. (*Where applicable: type suffix almost always exists; dir. prefix common; dir. suffix infrequent.) (I've actually wondered why Columbus doesn't put address numbers on the street signs...) The core name is the only part displayed at "full-size", though it's not "too big" like on the street signs in Westerville. Everything else is about half the font size as the core name, and all the text is aligned to a common midline. Suburban jurisdictions tend to apply variations: some use mixed-case text, some apply the same font size for the whole sign, many employ alternative colors, and a few use non-standard fonts and "icons"; still, most are consistent across their entire territory. Franklin County puts the county (or state or township) route designation in tiny text below the name, similar to most county signage practices in central Ohio. Delaware County seems to have guidelines that even apply in municipalities, apparently favoring backlit mixed-case Series E(M) hung from the same mast-arms as traffic lights, for major intersections. Finally, local usage. It's common to hear about South High Street or West Broad Street, particularly when referring to places far from Downtown. This may be a matter of collective habit; since those streets are so long, perhaps people tend to think of each of them as two or three completely distinct streets. (Based on typical casual usage, High Street seems to become North High Street somewhere north of OSU, while it apparently becomes South High Street as soon as it crosses I-70. Broad Street probably becomes East Broad Street at or near the Alum Creek Bridge, and it apparently becomes West Broad Street in the Hilltop neighborhood.) North Broadway is another one that frequently has its directional prefix attached, though it makes for an awkward concatenation of directions. I can't think of any others where the directional prefix is commonly used. However, I can think of several where use of the directional prefix just sounds strange: James Road, Lane Avenue, Dublin-Granville Road, Fourth Street, Fifth Avenue, Eleventh Avenue, Seventeenth Avenue, Wilson Road. I think the roads with prefixes attached are often the ones that have a lot of business on them which advertise their addresses in the media; conversely, roads that are mostly known as a means to get somewhere, rather than a destination, are better known without their directional prefix. As for residential streets with directional prefixes, I don't have first-hand knowledge of how often they're actually used. Most of the residential streets I'm familiar with don't cross Broad or High and are therefore prefix-free. Now it's time for my opinions regarding OpenStreetMap. I'm mostly in agreement with Kevin, but that's more a matter of pragmatism than passion. Before I conceded the abbreviation argument, I was perfectly happy with names like E 11th Ave. The only time I would change a TIGER name was to replace Pky with Pkwy. But I realized I was in the minority on that issue (either that, or those against abbreviations were just being extra assertive) and that's when I started putting the abbreviated name in abbr_name=*. This also meant that the name=* value wouldn't necessarily match addr:street=* when address data is added. When I saw someone else make a passing comment (that may well have been Kevin) about directional prefixes only being useful for addresses -- an opinion I already held -- I decided they could be left out of name=* in central Ohio. As long as the eventual addr:street=* still included them, there shouldn't be a problem. This newfound freedom to express my local knowledge along with the task of expanding abbreviations is what led to that previously-cited changeset in downtown Columbus. I also left the directional prefixes out of abbr_name=*, mostly because had I left them in, abbr_name=* would often be almost as long as name=*. I definitely didn't want to expand directional prefix abbreviations for name=* in most cases, because that would cause confusion regarding roads that have directional words in their cores, like West Case Road, North Star Road, Westpark Street, North Broadway, etc. Still, I'm not entirely satisfied; I started using abbr_name=* to satisfy the concept of storing "exactly what's on the sign", but that's not quite achieved if the directional prefix is left out. Maybe we should use signed_name=* or name:signed=* to store exactly what's on the sign, preserving abbreviation and prefixes where present? Between that and the proposals to break the name into different tags, what happens to good old name=*? Does it hold the full unabbreviated name, just the core of the name, or something in between? Pragmatism suggests that name=* should hold a "default" name that makes sense with no processing or parsing, to accommodate applications that don't understand more complicated tags. (As far as I'm aware, at the moment that's nearly all of them.) This is also the reasoning behind my stance on ref=*, and any other tag that may be expected by some editors to convey complicated or structured information. Now I'd like to address that argument about font sizes, prefixes, and driver confusion. Let's say a driver is looking for North Wilson Road. The sign actually says N WILSON RD, with WILSON twice as large as the rest. If their OSM-generated directions say North Wilson Road, they may or may not recognize quickly that the name on the sign is the same as the name on their printout. They don't look very much alike to me. Right now, OSM has the TIGER-endowed name=N Wilson Rd. That looks a lot like what's on the sign, and I think it would lead to successful navigation. It's my understanding that there's a bot running that would change it to North Wilson Road. If I get to it first, and haven't changed my mind on the matter, then it will get name=Wilson Road. That's fairly similar to what's on the sign, and exactly what locals call it. So if the driver has to stop at a gas station and ask for directions, asking for Wilson Road will result in the least confusion. If their OSM-based routing application actually looks at more than just name=* -- a highly unlikely scenario -- then the printed directions might have the road name formatted any number of different ways, with varying potential usability. More pragmatism ahead: A map's main purpose is to help someone get from one place to another. Changing Rd to Road when the sign says RD is slightly unhelpful for this purpose. Removing the N from the beginning, when it's present on the sign, is also slightly unhelpful. On the other hand, changing the N to North is a bit more unhelpful than omitting it, because it looks more like a word that's part of the road name. For nearly all uses of directional prefixes in central Ohio, that's not the case. PS: I'm seriously considering doing some major work with addresses around Columbus. As long as it's taking to make a satisfactory TIGER address import bot, I might as well just sit down with Potlatch and ArcExplorer's Identify tool to manually add address interpolation ways with help from Yahoo! imagery and my familiarity with the Franklin County address grid. I can also conduct in-person surveys and verification along key roads. -- David "Smith" a.k.a. Vid the Kid a.k.a. Bír'd'in Does this font make me look fat? _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us