I haven’t seen any discussion on CDPs for Michigan, so I wanted to bring them up. Some states will include them and others will not. For those who may not know what a CDP is, it stands for a Census Designated Place. Basically, it’s an area that is given a name for census purposes, but is not really an official town or city. According to Wikipedia, there are 96 in Michigan. I don’t really suggest adding them all as some are not really used and some may be within city limits. I also don’t suggest adding the ones that are for the entire township. But there are some small communities that are basically a small town or village and are well known. I think it makes sense to include those. What does everyone else think?
After looking at the list of CDPs as it appears on Wikipedia, I believe that most in the larger metro areas of Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing are significant enough to be included. More distinct rural/semi-rural areas should also receive a separate designation.
Doing a few quick searches, most if not all of the CDPs at least in the southern lower peninsula are already designated on the Waze map–even if that designation is not commonly referred to in the area. Many are major communities or suburbs, and others are not in common use, mostly because they may not be served by a post office with the same name. With that in mind, I would say ideally only include them if they have at least one official zip code where the post office uses the same name as the CDP.
CDPs around major metros like Detroit (including Oakland, Macomb counties) are readily identifiable as major or minor (albeit unincorporated) communities: Harrison Twp, Clinton Twp, Shelby Charter Twp (although it’s just shortened locally to Shelby Twp), Redford, etc. Lansing has Okemos, Holt, etc. Grand Rapids has Allendale, Jenison, Comstock Park, Byron Center, etc. Even Jackson has cough “suburbs” such as Spring Arbor, Napoleon, and Michigan Center that no one locally would classify as Jackson. These CDPs all happen to have postal names that correspond with the CDP name as well.
Rural CDPs would be similar but for the opposite reason–they have a post office but cannot be served by any larger neighboring population. Places like Indian River and Mio are well known even if they are little (and even if just because they are mentioned on signs on I-75). They could easily incorporate but haven’t.
The “grey area” seems to surround mid-size cities such as Kalamazoo. I actually grew up in Kalamazoo near the Eastwood CDP, and my parents still have the same house there. “Eastwood, MI” appears on the Waze map. In local use, Eastwood is just a neighborhood or part of the “east side” of Kalamazoo Twp. It is served by one “Kalamazoo” post office and is no different from other areas of Kzoo such as Milwood, Westwood, etc. Milwood is not a CDP, but Eastwood and Westwood are. Wikipedia even says “The area defined as the CDP may not correspond exactly with local understanding of the Eastwood neighborhood. The CDP may include nearby areas that locals would not necessarily identify as Eastwood.” A similar sentence appears in the entry for Westwood. In cases like this, it may be really confusing to direct someone to Eastwood, MI or Westwood, MI because everyone says they live in Kalamazoo Twp or just Kalamazoo–mostly because that’s what they see on their mail, or that’s the entity to whom they send their local taxes. Another example from around Kalamazoo is “South Gull Lake”, where everyone would simply refer to it as Gull Lake, which matches the name of the high school and all local services. Finally, there is a CDP for “Comstock Northwest”, which is distinct from Comstock, the actual unincorporated community. Having never heard of the former designation before this morning, I would just get directions or send mail to “Comstock” instead since as with other CDPs in this grey area, Comstock Northwest does not have a separate post office. Of course, maybe this is just an historical problem with how Kzoo has handled their post offices, and the rest of the state isn’t as screwed up… 
I agree with your thoughts as well. You mentioned Indian River and I believe that’s a very good example. I grew up in northern Michigan and until today, I didn’t know that Indian River wasn’t an official town. It certainly seems like one and I think it deserves to be treated as one.
It is true that many of these are already on the map, but not all are. for example, I added Eastport myself. It was my opinion that it should show up on the map. But after doing so, I decided I should probably see what others thought about CDPs. I certainly don’t think every single one needs to be added and even some that are already there could probably be removed. But there are definitely ones that make sense to me.
Very good discussion. I agree that Westwood/Eastwood should probably be changed to Kalamazoo despite being CDPs. Same goes for South Gull Lake.
I’d like to jump in with a slightly off topic question about how to handle townships. Many of the Township areas in Kzoo county are shown in Waze and appear in the client and Live Map. However, no one would say I’m from Prairie Ronde Township. They would say i’m from such and such a town/village. Having both the township name and the town/village name clutters up the map.
There are a couple of townships where the roads do not bear the township name, and the map appears far less cluttered.
There are also a couple of Townships that are listed as Greater XX Area, where XX is the township name. It’s safe to say that no one refers to these areas as “Greater”. It’s just plain confusing.
I propose removing the township name for all roads in unincorporated areas of townships. For CDPs, if they are attached to a larger city, then call them that city name. If a CDP stands alone, then yes call them out. Does that make sense?
I think that with a few exceptions, it is safe to remove “Township” or “Twp” from the city name. Do some research first though so as not to conflict with other parts of the state. Much of Washtenaw and Livingston counties where I drive just have the first part of the township name listed. The exceptions are where people readily identify with a township (i.e. “Hamburg Twp” is distinct from the tiny village of “Hamburg” in the township where I live) or where omitting the township name would direct people to a city that is not located within the township (i.e. we still have “Marion Township” on our maps in Livingston because Marion is a distinct village up near Cadillac). I think that in the Kalamazoo area, shortening to Prairie Ronde, Texas, Alamo, etc. would at least be consistent with what appears elsewhere in the southern LP.
As for “Greater […] Area”, it is ridiculous in many cases. Segments were imported that way into the base map, but it’s just a catch-all for no-man’s land. There are still a few areas with that designation over in the Detroit area, but it’s all rural area that no one has cleaned up yet, likely because few editors have driven within range or have made it a priority. In general, the Greater designation is being shortened to the township name in the Detroit area.
For townships, I just saw this thread in the Michigan forum: https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=630&t=59026
Although I haven’t seen a lot of discussion on removal of townships, that does seem to be what most people seem to want to do. Myself included. Main charter townships should of course stay, but a LOT of the townships are never spoken of and many locals may not even know what township they live in. When I lived in northern Michigan, I probably only heard the township name a couple of times in school and never anywhere else. And I lived in the area for 15-20 years. I don’t like how the map looks like a quilt with townships across almost the entire state. You can’t very easily see where the cities and towns are and some of those townships cover up the cities so you can’t see the city boundaries at all. It’s just a mess. The “greater area” ones can definitely be removed. I haven’t seen anyone say they wanted those to stay. The townships probably need more discussion before removing them, or at least agreement from some of the Champs and level 5+ editors in Michigan.
For any township that remains, it should be named X Twp. It should not be just X and should not be X Township. Right now, most townships are just written as X and this is causing problems when there are towns or cities with the same name. If the township needs to be there, mark it as X Twp so it’s clear that you’re looking at a township and not a city.
As far as removing townships or greater areas, just removing them from the roads will not remove them from the map in most cases. If the township is in the city layer itself, we can’t do anything to change that layer other than request that Waze make the changes. There is a thread already for removing or fixing cities, towns, and townships in Michigan. But I haven’t seen any of the ones mentioned there get fixed yet. It’s a long process to get any of those fixed up, unfortunately.
I experimented with changing Westwood to Kalamazoo from Drake Rd to Nichols Rd and from Ravine Rd to Main St. I’ll check how it looks in the Live Map and client in a couple of days once it’s updated.
I agree with most of what has been said here. Remove unnecessary township names (I would not go too crazy with this, though); include either “Twp” or “Township” in all township names (because no one says “I live in Clinton”, or “I live in Charter Township of Clinton”, they say “I live in Clinton Township”); include CDPs… unless they’re ones no one uses, I guess. “Greater x Area” is always garbage.
For naming, I would say, use “Twp” or “Township” in all township names (I’m wary about using an abbreviation Waze doesn’t pronounce correctly); for CDPs that aren’t townships, just use the name.
If there is a conflict within the state, there are two options I see:
- For the more/most important (most populous, etc.) instance of that name, use just the name. For all other instances, use the name and county, like so: “City (County)”
- Use the name and county for all instances: “City (County)”
The first would look better for the people of the most important instance of a city name, but may cause confusion if there are two Bobtowns with a 123 Main St. That’s where the second option becomes smarter.
Regarding the options for duplicate city names, I like the first option better. There aren’t going to be many duplicates and seeing every city appear as City (County) just looks really bad, imo. If the number of duplicates was significant, then I might think differently.
As far as removing townships that aren’t needed, we can remove them from streets, but that won’t remove them from the map because they are part of the city layer. There is a thread in the forum for cities to update/remove/whatever that supposedly would pass on the names to Waze to get fixed on the city layer. I’m not sure that anything is being done with the locations listed in that thread. I think we would be best served to try and get all of those locations to Waze and get them to update the city layer for them. At the same time, I would ask them to do a database removal and/or update of the townships that we want removed or changed. Rather than trying to changes hundreds of thousands of segments to remove township names or change them to X Twp or X Township, they can do a quick replacement in the database for all matches within the state. It’s a matter of less than 5 minutes to set it up and and seconds to add each township that needs fixed or removed. It may be low priority on their end, but if we can try and push it, they may look into it for us and save us a LOT of work.
Yeah, I’m somewhat familiar with that thread/form/whatever it is. In all my reading of it, though, I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around exactly what the procedure is, which form to use, and so forth. It seems that requests need to be approved by a Champ, or something like that, but that Champs have preapproval and can move requests through the system more quickly.
The best thing to do at this point is get a list together of townships to remove, townships to reformat (to “x Township” or “x Twp”), and cities to rename in general. Once we do that, I’ll figure out exactly how to get it done—I haven’t had any reason to try.
So it might be beside the point, but why is the city layer not related to the city name in the street? What purpose does each of them serve, or are they redundant? Just curious…
The city layer is a layer that was imported directly from another source and is currently not editable by us. Waze has said they will make it editable by us at some point. If you add a new city that is not in the city layer, then the city layer displayed (not to be confused with the actual city layer in the database) will highlight the city based on the streets. So in effect, you have 2 layers combined into one when viewing the map. One is editable by us by changing the streets and one is not.
Benefits of not using the streets… City boundaries rarely follow streets, so you can have large sections that have no streets around them that are part of a city and you can have odd shaped edges on cities. By not using the streets, the boundaries can be “drawn” to match the real boundaries. This can be useful for a number of reasons. For one, the boundaries are accurate. By being accurate, if you were to add a new street while the city layer is turned on, you can easily see if the street is inside or outside of the city boundaries (or half in/half out) so you can set the city name correctly. Unlike with using the streets, you won’t have times when a street that has the city name assigned doesn’t appear within the boundaries due to the way the polygon is shaped. Sometimes, the automatic polygon can cut off sections of streets as it tries to best cover the area.
Benefits of using streets… For one, this is currently the only way to edit the city layer ourselves and only works for cities that aren’t on the actual city layer. And second, there isn’t any extra work that needs to be done beyond setting the city names on the segments correctly, which is already needed. You don’t have to go another step to change the city layer directly. So it can be a little less work. And second, in cases where the boundaries may not be known, but where you know at least the main roads that are inside the city limits, the automatic polygons can help to highlight the city fairly well. If you were trying to add that to the city layer, you’d have to guess the shape and position of the polygon and that’s somewhat less ideal.
In the end, we need to be able to get access to the city layer itself and remove the automatic city polygons that are based on the streets. Once we can edit the city layer, those won’t be necessary because we can just add them in ourselves. And then we have a single layer to worry about. That being said, I think the potential of having multiple layers could be useful - a city layer that works like it does now, a mailing/address layer that is used for searching for addresses to help with address problems, and even township and county layers that can also be used for address searches. For other countries, you might have other things that can go into layers to help with searching. But from the client or Live Map, you should only see the city layer. The rest would only be available through the editor and used for searching. Just my opinion on that, though.
As far as townships, almost all townships in Michigan are currently just the name without Twp or Township, so any that are being kept need to be fixed. North of Roscommon (and probably even further south), I can’t think of any townships that need to stay in either the lower peninsula or upper peninsula. I think the townships that are actually used are all down south around the larger cities. I may be wrong about that, so anyone can correct me if there are townships that are important in the northern part of the state that I’m not thinking of. I can say for certain that McKinley Township can go, having lived within that township for around 15 years. And having lived there and traveled around the state, I can’t think of any others up there that are really necessary.
I probably mentioned these in the other thread, but here are ones that are actual problems rather than just annoyances…
- Bliss [township] - First, it isn’t needed. Second, unless it’s removed or changed to Bliss Twp/Township, I can’t highlight the town of Bliss on the map.
- Conway [township] - There is a Conway Twp in southern Michigan and a town of Conway in northern Michigan. Unless Conway township is removed or renamed, I can’t add Conway to the map without calling it something else such as including the county in the name, which I’d rather not do.
- Carp Lake - I am unaware of a Carp Lake township, but apparently Carp Lake is somewhere on the map because I can’t add it to the map. So wherever that is, we need to find out if it is legitimate and what to do with it.
I know I also included some cities in that other thread that just need updated because the city layer doesn’t show the boundaries even though the streets are correctly marked. I won’t include those here, but you’ll want to take note of them if you’re going to bring these to Waze for removal/fixing.