Greater 'xxx' area vs. 'xxx'

[ratmice]

In my locale, in the city field, most roads are lableled as "Greater 'xxx' Area" rather than 'xxx', where 'xxx' is the name of the town. Should these be changed? I didn't see any precise protocol for this, but I assume that the town name would be preferable.

[AndyPoms]

"Greater XXX Area" typically implies an unincorporated area, I don't know how things are in MA, but in CT, we don't have any unincorporated areas, so we are in the midst of removing all "Greater XXX Area" as well as neighborhood names. See the CT To-Do page in the Waze Wiki for our list of "towns" to remove. Please note that the city layer doesn't update as often as the map does (which is slow now due to infrastructure updates) so it is usually harder to work on these, especially when you miss that one tiny segment...

I'd also check with user "harling" via PM he's Country Manager based in the Boston Area & covers Eastern Mass & Southern New Hampshire to see if he has any guidance...

[ratmice]

It looks like Mass. is simlar to CT in terms of having all incorporated areas. I sent harling a PM for completeness' sake.

[harling]

Got your PM. Yup, the "Greater xxx area" city names were part of the basemap, which presumably was obtained from (or at least generated by) the Commonwealth. There are circumstances in which a street is in, for example, Boston, but the locals still refer to it by "neighborhood" (e.g., Brighton, Dorchester). In those cases, I could see someone wanting to refer to it as "Greater Boston area", to distinguish it from the borders of "Boston proper". Though as far as I can tell, all of the above list only "Boston" as their city.

If you are familiar enough with an area to know where the actual city/town boundaries are, and how the locals refer to it, feel free to change the city name at the same time that you set the proper direction & turns. But if you aren't that familiar, don't simply make the replacement every time you see "Greater xxx area"; for all we know, the basemap might also have used that nomenclature rather than naming every single town outright on the map. For example, "Greater Springfield Area" might encompass any number of smaller towns nearby, and it might be inaccurate simply to change them all to "Springfield" automatically.

[jondrush]

In my area it was sometimes done to differentiate townships and boroughs with the same name. A big pain to deal with in the old days.

[ratmice]

Some question about this situation: After the latest tile update, I was checking on some of the changes that should have been made, and it seems that they didn't happen. I noticed that some of these changes had the city listed as 'city' rather than 'Greater city area'. Does not matching the auto-generated city name, displayed at the top of the map by the editor, influence the incorporation of edits onto the map?

Second question, what happens when there is a mix of the two names in the same area? For example, some roads indentified as belonging to 'city' and others as belonging to 'greater city area'?

Also, is there an accepted best way effect the change, when appropriate, over a large area (like the whole town)?

Thanks.

[AndyPoms]

First, the city layer doesn't update with the map tiles... Usually it happens a few days after a map tile update, but it hasn't happened for the last few cycles...

The city name in the upper left of WME isn't always accurate, it's a best guess... It is usually wrong when working near city/town borders...

There is no way to bulk update the name, it has to be done street by street...

[mapcat]

Is there any need at all for "Greater xxx area"?

If the support staff could be so moved, would anyone mind if I suggested deleting all instances of it from the database, to be replaced with nothing? Then, editors could select individual streets with no city name and add a name when appropriate.

[AndyPoms]

Is there any need at all for "Greater xxx area"?

If the support staff could be so moved, would anyone mind if I suggested deleting all instances of it from the database, to be replaced with nothing? Then, editors could select individual streets with no city name and add a name when appropriate.

I have a fear that if we do that we'll lose the town borders we already have in the city layer and they will be harder to recreate. If we do it manually or if they can find a way to replace "Greater [town] Area" with just "[town]" would be better... It's pretty simple to code, first remove the last 5 characters ("_Area") and then remove the first 8 characters ("Greater_"). It can probably be done in 5 lines of code or less...

[mapcat]

I have a fear that if we do that we'll lose the town borders we already have in the city layer and they will be harder to recreate. If we do it manually or if they can find a way to replace "Greater [town] Area" with just "[town]" would be better... It's pretty simple to code, first remove the last 5 characters ("_Area") and then remove the first 8 characters ("Greater_"). It can probably be done in 5 lines of code or less...

That would work in some states, but not everywhere. In Connecticut everything is in one town or another, but in states like Michigan and Minnesota, it's just clutter. Recreating would have to be done at the support level anyway, since this would involve manipulating a field in the database that we can't touch.

One of the benefits to removing "Greater..." would be that it would never be shown as an option in the pull-down menus, and therefore would never be assigned to a city in error.