Since my email client sent my messages direct to the OP and not to the list, I'm going to resend them:
First response: ----------------- We have to be careful that the availability of this granularity doesn't insecure the road names, specifically in cases where part of the road name could be confused as a prefix or suffix. Let me throw a few usage cases for the metro Atlanta area out to illustrate. Cobb county uses the quadrant suffix system where everything in the part of the county closest to the city of Atlanta gets a SW suffix. Most of the time, locals ignore the suffix. Separating the suffix makes sense in this context since it is treated as secondary information by locals. One place where I can see a non-invasive goofing up our local roads is North Decatur Road. That road is named after the North Decatur area through which it runs, as best I can tell from my local knowledge, therefore making "North" part of the name of the road and not a prefix. Locals, when giving directions, treat the name as North Decatur, always including, North as part of the name. You'll never hear a local send someone to Decatur Road. Breaking North away from Decatur does not make sense in this context (and the local transit agency confuses locals, me included, by making this mistake on the time table charts on their website). Similarly, The By Way is a road for which separating the prefix, "The," the name, "By," and the road type, "Way," doesn't make grammatical sense and the road is not mentioned without the while name. As a local mapper, I would not want this name broken up since, in our hyper-local context, it does not make sense to do so. (Compare the second and third cases to East Ponce de Leon Avenue, locally shortened to Ponce or Ponce de Leon. The directional prefix and road type are treated as secondary, discardable information in local speech.) ------------------ Second response: ------------------ I'm less than enthusiastic about regionally specific tags but it's feasible to me that other areas may find this proposal useful. Would you be opposed to just splitting off the directional prefixes and suffixes, thereby leaving the road type and name prefix combined with the name? I think, to me, that it's important to leave the information that uniquely identified the road together. In my never-humble opinion, only splitting out the directional would balance my concern for keeping the name as complete as possible and splitting out the information which is, contextually, secondary information. ----------------- And now an inline response: On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Paul Norman <penor...@mac.com> wrote: > > My understanding from the SOTM-US talk is that he proposes redefining what > the name tag means and that for a street like "K Street NW" the name of > that > street is simply K. If this is the reason for the change, I'm going to argue against it: to me, the full official street name is the one with all of the prefixes and suffixes. I can see cases, as I quoted in my first two responses, where a distant armchair mapper with decent intentions might override local knowledge about the word "North" in the road name "North Decatur Road." I think that I'm of the opinion that, if this is implemented as supplementary tags, we can display this like the tiger import tags did, breaking down the street name into it's techical parts. The problems that this proposal might introduce include reprogramming the navigation packages to recognize the old way and the proposed way of structuring street names; the last thing I need, while listening to my navigation software give directions, is to be told, "Turn right on to By," when the correct direction is, "Turn right on to The By Way." I think that it's an interesting way of looking at the data, but I don't think the current way of writing the street name introduces ambiguity. Actually, I think the proposed way could add ambiguity for software which is not programmed for the proposed method. Try navigating around the Metro Atlanta area with the road name "Peachtree" separated from the road type "Street" or "Place" or one of the other oodles of Peachtree-something combinations (again, from software not adapted to this proposal).
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