I think they’ve been rebuilt twice in the last fortnight.
Let’s hope they do this on a monthly basis. Will help us get rid of the smudges and identify what suburbs are left to fix.
I don’t s’pose there’s any way other than driving through them to determine whether smudges have been fixed or not, is there?
I drove down to Melbourne and back (from Sydney) along the Hume a couple of weeks ago and identified a list of a dozen or more suburbs that are smudged, and have been wondering what to do with that list…
The problem is that the client map city layer is rarely updated by Waze. In Vic we finished removing ghost cities on the update map 6 months ago but most of them still appear on the client. The update map city layer appears to be rebuilt, in various priorities, from overnight to a month but the client almost never.
This issue is a problem since it generates URs and bad newbie responses.
Citynames are ‘baked’ into the maptiles. To get rid of the wrong names, every single maptile that have this name in it (so all tiles that were in the city polygon), have to be ‘updated’. The smallest maptiles are about 1 km² (max zoomed in). A maptile will ONLY be updated during a tileupdate, if there is made a change to the tile, otherwise it stays as it is.
Thanks maantje76! Is there a way to force an update of all the relevant tiles? Australia is a large place and huge areas have almost no people and nil cell phone coverage. There is no way for us to attack every tile.
What I do normaly, in case of a city smudge, is draw a piece of railroad between the two (or more) smudged cities. Don’t enter a cityname! As streetname I will sugest to use a name that others understand why it’s there. Something like ‘smugdefix’. Keep in mind to split a very long segment is several smaller parts before saving (max 20km). Longer distance probably cause problems when you delete them (ghost segment).
Railroad is invisable in the client, but it forces a tile update for all tiles it crosses. Depending on the polygon you probably need a few parallel.
After a few maptile updates you can remove them again…
It’s just a workaround. It shouldn’t be like this offcourse, but it’s better then nothing…
Thanks maantje76, I might give it a go. There’s a couple of smudges in my client that I see on the way to work that have been removed for the editor for some time now.
That might not work so well between Sydney and Melbourne! 
Thanks. I’ll give the smudgefix railroad a go in the central coast, quite a few stubborn city names remain despite all roads/landmarks being updated.
Why it shouldn’t work? Yes it takes some time offcourse! If you want me to help, let me know…then I will ask Countrywide permissions tomorrow morning…I see the Australian map is full of huge smudges…
Sorry - wasn’t a clear post. 800+ km of railway line in 20km maximum lengths would work, but would take an awful long time… I suppose I could look for AM rights for that whole swathe of country between Melbourne and Sydney…
Out of interest, How do you see the smudges? I’ve only ever seen them on the client when driving, not on the editor…
Citylayer 
maybe switch off the aerials and zoom and pan around. Maybe they are to big to display.
There are really a lot of them. I did investigate a few. one has four city locations spread around the country. There are also a few more huge examples.
There are also smaller ones, like Brisbane. I checked one corner of that smudge…There’s a freeway with cityname Brisbane crossing other cities (towns, villages, etc…). Driving in these cities will also display Brisbane in the client. This was done by one of the Australian CM’s.
I don’t understand why providing a cityname to freeway segments in the first place. As far as I know there aren’t other countries doing that. Only naming exits and ramps is what usually is done. I won’t go in technical details to much now, probably there is a good reason, probably not.
I think it’s important to get the community better informed about the correct citynames, so there won’t be that much smudges in the future.
Probably we have to make some plans for city naming. In a few countries that I’m managing we added all citynames to the database and locked it for changes. So now only those names could be used. And only around the citycenter of it. That is a lot of work for a small country, so for Australia that will take ages
But probably we can get some data imported.
I will get in contact with the Australian local champs to see what we can do…
Ok, I’ve done a bit more investigating too…
I discovered that one of the smudges I was getting on my drive from Sydney to Melbourne (Kensington kept appearing in the client map) may be related to the fact that I discovered rivers and lakes with an address of Kensington, Australia! (see https://world.waze.com/editor/?zoom=2&lat=-35.07145&lon=148.12891&layers=BTTFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTFTT&landmarks=571738). This one is further complicated by having both Gundagai and Gundagai, NSW as city names…
What’s the protocol with addresses for natural landmarks? I’m thinking about rivers in particular, which could easily cross several cities. My natural inclination would be to say no city.
Rivers, lakes, railways, freeways. None should have city names IMHO.
Most of the landmarks don’t need a cityname. Some of them did become one automaticaly when the landmark ‘adress’ option came available. But I’ve never seen city smudges caused by landmarks.
However, alternative citynames do cause smudges.
About your Kensington issue…
Here you see the problem locations:
- https://world.waze.com/editor/?zoom=4&lat=-35.35498&lon=146.71962&layers=BTTFFTTTTFTTFTFTFTFTTTTFT&segments=104965366
- https://world.waze.com/editor/?zoom=6&lat=-35.81534&lon=145.55597&layers=BTTFFTTTTFTTFTFTFTFTTTTFT&segments=105250559
- https://world.waze.com/editor/?zoom=7&lat=-34.03581&lon=151.00681&layers=BTTFFTTTTFTTFTFTFTFTTTTFT&segments=100700029
There’s is at least 1 other point, but you can’t find it easily, because of the huge overlapping ‘Broadwater’ smudge.
But to give you an idea, ‘draw a triangle’ between these 3 points…Kensington can show up everywhere in that triangle…
And I didn’t respond yet on this…
800km is just adding 39 nodes after drawing 1 segment (but before saving)…
Ok, that’s interesting…
I’ve edited the third point so that it no longer says kensington as the city name. I can’t draw a railroad between the points though, as I don’t have editing rights at either of the other two points…
True enough, but I’d have to submit a whole lot of AM requests to get editing rights to the full 800km! I’m only a level 3 editor 