Is there any specific reason why we don’t have County names in the city field? I spoke with Jay91150 on chat regarding the issue and he said “no” but mostly because that’s what he was told while he was moving up through the ranks. He figured a more senior editor may have more details.
The issue I see is that there are multiples of the same roads with no city field filled out. So you’d be presented with multiple Range Road 195, Alberta’s (as an example). Here’s a couple permalinks to what I’m referring to:
Two Range Road 195s, but two different counties half way across the province. I’m under the impression that there is a re-occurance every time you cross a meridian, but I may be wrong. Which means you could easily have 2 of most Range Road numbers in the province of Alberta. Townships are likely the same. This could be solved if you were to search and you saw Leduc County, AB, or Brazeau County, AB rather than just Alberta when searching a road.
You are correct. There may be duplicate range roads in each province based on where the prime meridians are located. And therefore duplicate addresses. The only way I know to address this in Waze is by adding County names in the City field but, as has already been mentioned, this idea has already been rejected. Waze also does not allow for house numbers to be more than 5 digits so certain rural addresses can’t be easily represented.
Or for unit numbers, which causes the problem of multiple businesses showing the exact same address across multiple units in a mall. Or multiple sub units on a single quarter of rural land. Ahhh, the little things that get missed and cause an issue to us silly non urbanites.
It is important to note that Waze also returns results from other sources. So it is possible you can get a better result if there isn’t a fuzzy match available in Waze’s db.
Also, for the non-urbanites: Waze has consistently positioned itself as a tool for commuters – to find the best (fastest) path through the urban jungle when there are multiple paths available. The fact that it works at all in the boondocks is a bit of a miracle!
I’m actually finding it fantastic for finding private lease roads to oil pumpjacks and the sort. Since I can add the missing roads in, I’m finding it much better than Google Maps at actually getting me home without routing me to one AB border or another before getting me home. Just a few minor changes to the ways addresses and addressing are handled and it would be perfect.
That is one of the side benefits about the crowd-sourced maps – they become more than they were intended to be, by an individual editor taking an interest.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s awesome that this works for you – but anything that requires Waze staff time pretty much has to fit within that mandate of urban commutes.
Sorry for getting here late. Like mtylerb said, we discussed it in another place beforehand.
There are a couple of places in the province where we have some county names that have been added (or never removed) from roads. Special Areas 2, 3, and 4 are three of them (believe it or not, there’s no Special Area 1), and one of the counties on the road up to Fort McMurray (perhaps Athabasca?). If you turn city view on, those will show up as big polygons as doctorkb (and/or others) said up above.
Township roads start at zero at the Alberta/Montana border and go up to something in the thousands (somewhere around 1800), never repeating. Range roads start at zero at the Alberta/Saskatchewan border and go up to around 300, then repeat. The repeat is at each meridian, as mentioned; the AB/SK border is the 4th meridian (110°), a line roughly going thru Calgary (114°) is the 5th, and depending how far north you are, you can be in Alberta and be west of the 6th (118°). Range roads will start over at 0 (technically; 10 in reality, just west of the meridian) at each of these meridians. So Rockyview County, where I live, has addresses on Range Road 11, which is west of Range Road 293, also in Rockyview.
IMO, Waze needs to expand its addressing to allow counties, so that this kind of thing is discernible between the two (or more) areas. Putting it in the cities is suboptimal because of the reasons we’ve mentioned above.
So is the discernible border the only reason for not having county names in city slots? Will it just show
| Leduc County | Leduc |
or would it show more like
Leduc County Leduc
Either way, I’m not entirely sure that that would bother me looking at the map. I’d prefer to see that and consistently see a county/city name rather than just random blotches of “Pigeon Lake #138” and the sort.
Well, Pigeon Lake #138 (and similar) is interesting as it is a native reserve. Not sure if that is more city like or more county like…
Regardless, this is about appearances and the concern is that there would be no line, so we’d have something more like edmontonbeaumontniskuleduccountyleduc – rather than being able to somewhat understand when you’re approaching a city / town.
Ultimately, this wasn’t our idea to remove (staff had it), but it was one with our support (and I continue to support it).
Ahh, well if it looked similar to that, I can understand. Too bad they couldn’t just outline the border of the town with a 1px border to show defined separation. Seems like a relatively easy fix, but most of my experience is with PHP/CSS/HTML/JS and the sort. I really don’t know how involved it would be with an app like Waze.
Regardless, if they decided to consider some sort of border, or even a different shader for counties, I’d support that. If it stays as it is currently, then the current system works alright.
