I am still fairly new at map editing and have been trying to find information on when and how to set the city name on road sections.
I know that for things like parking lot roads there should be no city name and no road name. My concern is about regular roads that are outside of cities. I have noticed that about half of the roads I run into have the township name as the city and the other half have no city name associated to it at all.
Is there a best practice for this? I found some road sections that are not named at all and wanted to add the proper street name, but I also want to make sure I get the city name correct as well.
Here is a specific example. I know that this segment is in the Town of Hudson, but it is well outside of the City of Hudson. This can be seen when you turn on the maps layer. Should the city name be ‘Hudson’ or should the box be checked for ‘No City’?
Another example is here. This one needs a road name, but should the city name be left as St. Joseph or cleared? This road is in the Town of St. Joseph, however there is no city of St. Joseph in this county (the mailing address is actually Hudson).
First, and explanation of why the city field is blank. Waze only allows one instance of a unique city name in the editor. In your example the city of Hudson obviously got the name without any prefix or suffex. Usually, when a city is surrounded by a town of the same name, the town got a “Greater Hudson Area” or “Town of Hudson” Sometimes it did not work (or there is another town of Hudson somewhere that caused an error.
You can try “Town of Hudson”, “Hudson Twp” etc. If a name is already used, WME will let you know. Mailing address city names are irrelevant, as far as I’m aware. Just be sure to check official maps to make sure you are correctly placing the “City”. There are various mapping resources linked to in the Wisconsin Mapping Resources the County Maps (Under DOT maps) and GIS maps in particular.
Thanks for the response. I have been using the St. Croix County GIS map as my primary resource for naming streets and adding house numbers. I fall back on the DOT & county maps if the GIS map is unclear for any reason.
I also understand the reasons for not using USPS city names and the problems that can cause.
My question is: What should I do when a road is outside of a proper city or village (as designated by county & state maps)? Do I set the city field to ‘None’ or use the city from the ‘cities’ layer in WME?
A good example is the Town of Warren. I know that if a road is within the boundaries of the City of Roberts, ‘Roberts’ should be used in the city field. However if a road is well outside the city boundaries, like these roads, should they have ‘Warren’ in the city field or should the city field checked as ‘None’?
My personal preference would be to have the city field checked as ‘None’. My main reason for this is because the town boundaries are largely unknown even to locals. I talked to several people who live in the area and nobody had any idea where the Town of Warren was located and one even argued with me about whether or not it even existed. My fear is that having the city field marked as ‘Warren’ could cause confusion when people are searching for places outside of Roberts but within the Town of Warren. (Specifically places like this golf course or this one in the Town of St. Joseph)
Another reason is that I think the use of ‘Gerater Somewhereville Area’ looks really odd when ‘Somewhereville’ has a fairly small population.
I don’t want to just go around changing things because I think they should be a certain way, I want to do things right and with group consensus so things are consistent for the people using Waze. I spent quite a bit of time searching the forums for similar scenarios and found that several people from various parts of the country state their preference is that if a road is outside of a proper city boundary, the city filed should be set to ‘None’. However I was not able to find a post where anybody said ‘Yes, we need to do it this way’ or ‘No, we need to do it some other way’.
This is the same view that I held when I started editing. However, I don’t think other people’s ignorance should be used to justify a decision.
You also raise some good points, but unfortunately the answer you’re looking for has a lot of gray area. Out in Somewhereville, it seems perfectly reasonable to have the city layer set to “none”. Other areas, people confuse the townships with cities - Grand Chute, in the Appleton area is one of those examples. Another one that comes to mind is the Town of Scott in Brown County - there is a water tower there that says SCOTT in big letters, right by the highway. If I wasn’t involved with Waze editing, I would have no idea about its borders, etc. even though I’ve been driving past it since I’ve been a kid.
The fact is that townships are very real in Wisconsin, and they do have legal status (ex. I was married in Fish Creek, an unincorporated city, when we went to file the paperwork, we had written Fish Creek, not knowing any better, and the clerk had to change it to Gibraltar, which is the town that Fish Creek is in. So, I don’t think omitting them is the answer either.
I’ll send out some messages to the other AM’s for Wisconsin to look at this thread, hopefully we can get this resolved.
OK. I spoke with GizmoGuy411 (the Great Lakes Regional Coordinator) and he informed me that this is being discussed for formal guidance in the wiki. So, I would really say that it’s up to you whether you want to add them at this point or remove them. Just remember that you may be adding them back in if you remove them (or vice versa). I personally would leave the data in for now, like your St. Joseph example - just make sure it’s actually in St. Joseph though.
Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you right now.