Incorrect suburbs / Suburb limits

Map Editors Community Australia
1

Since I started using Waze, I have noticed when driving that very often the application shows the incorrect suburb, and I’ve seen a number of Update Requests about the same issue, Incorrect Suburbs. A very common suburb that shows almost everywhere I drive is Windsor (btw, I live in QLD).

I have noticed that in Cartouche, many unidentified roads (the red ones) have Windsor (there are other problematic suburbs like Paddington, Newstead, Red Hill, etc. but let’s just talk about Windsor as example) as city name by default, and I thought that was the problem. I thought that those roads where pulling the suburb limits incorrectly. So I started changing as many new roads as I could, putting the correct suburb, hoping that this would fix the problem, but the problem was still there. And newly recorded roads, especially in new areas, would have Windsor as default city.

So I decided to write to alpha asking for help. The reply was not only helpful but also very interesting. What happens is that those problematic suburbs exist also in other states. For example there is Windsor in QLD, VIC and NSW. So, yes, there are streets pulling the suburb limits but they are in other states!

The solution is something that was discussed in another thread (http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=4704). This is, to add the state to the name of the suburb. This should be a temporary solution while a State field is added to the system. The person from the alpha team who replied to my email said that they have updated the incorrect suburbs that I reported adding the state name, example ‘Oxley QLD’ and ‘Oxley VIC’.

So it seems that adding the state to the name of the suburb is definitely the way to go for now.

2

I was having the same problem in my area. Thanks for the info

3

Since pipelongar’s post in April 2011, there still does not seem to be any update/fix on this yet.
I’ve also noticed with the new Map Editor, that if you select several streets to bulk-edit, the State option lists only as “Other”.

4

The problem shows up again as soon as someone enters a suburb that exists in another state.
Hopefully with the new editor we will have soon a way to enter a proper state, and not just Other as it is at the moment.

We don’t have that many states and territories here in Australia, so it doesn’t seem that hard to divide all the roads in their proper states.

5

Thanks for that, I have been wondering about some randomly occurring suburb names (I too had tried checking the name of every single road in sight, with no luck).

The problem though, is that I get errant suburb names showing up, but as far as I can tell there are no, or very few segments named that way in any area I can edit. So it isn’t actually a problem I can fix. :expressionless:

6

I don’t think that would alter much.

Seeing as some highways have suburbs tagged on them that are in the wrong suburb, or having roads with one way with a suburb on it and the other way with another suburb on it.

maybe highways should drop the suburb or maybe an overall city as a suburb that way it’d have such a low % of the overall local roads suburb name.

I do notice the overall suburb name only comes from the name of the roads in that area, on the map editable or not.

The map isn’t 100% updated as yet, I think it’s still stuck at 24/7 all the hardware updates have caused the big delay maybe some other problems along the way but hopefully they will be able to do weekly or daily updates soon.

So a lot of these problems might get cleared up fairly quick.

7

Yes, this is an annoying problem. Especially when a road has a suburb name that comes from another state. I had to find a road in another state and change it’s suburb as it had the NSW suburb in it.

The sooner Waze adds the AU state to the editor, the better.

8

So it seems Waze has updated the cities layer. there’s indications that this will be a more common occurance as well.
http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26803&hilit=cities+layer&start=140#p294790

i’ve been adding “, NSW” to all the suburbs i’ve edited- the “todo” list reference is very ambiguous and there’s still heaps of cities that span states. i don’t want to add to the problem by excluding state but i also don’t want to create a future problem (can cities be bulk-edited by Waze staff?) -
any thoughts on how i should proceed?

9

Hopefully a few of the city problems will disappear with the more frequent city layer updates.
Windsor is a particularly prevalent one here in Melbourne also. There appears to be a huge city of Windsor spanning at least Sydney, Melbourne & possibly Brisbane. I have fixed the Melbourne Windsor. It would be nice if a Sydneyite could go and edit the western Sydney Windsor to something appropriate like ‘Windsor NSW’. There are only a handful of streets at this stage so it should only take 5 minutes. Use the WME Highlighter addon to see all the relevant streets.
This whole problem is so obvious in the city layer view. It will be too difficult to repair until the Waze gods give us our 8 states.
It appears that in the early days the “Too far away error” was not part of the editor. It now is, so new problems cannot be started but it seems to be possible to extend existing problems. If someone hits enter when trying to choose Wangaratta and accidentally selects Windsor it sometimes does not complain and extends the city of Windsor even further…
Does anyone know if it is possible to discover what city one of the colour polygons from City Layer thinks it belongs to?

10

We have a discussion going in New Zealand about how to best use the City field and whether it should be populated with city, suburb, town, or even left blank in rural areas. Reading the posts here it sounds like you’ve done a bit of work already in this area in Australia.
I couldn’t see anything in your Wiki pages on use of the City field- do you have a standard approach to how this field is used that we could learn from?

The issues we’re trying to solve include the correct appearance of names on the map for cities, suburbs (within cities), smaller towns and rural areas. We’re also proposing the use of alternative names to aid in searching where either the city or suburb name might be used.

There’s only a few people involved in the discussion at the moment so looking for external input and ideas. Any thoughts you can share would be appreciated.

11

Ive been editing around the area I live: Rosehill, NSW, and have discovered that there is a City label of “Newport” right in the middle of this suburb which really shouldn’t be there, but I’ve been unable to find out what map elements are making this City name appear.
Permalink is: https://world.waze.com/editor/?zoom=4&lat=-33.82108&lon=151.01798&layers=BFTFFTTTTTTFTTTTTTTTTFT
I’m using both Safari 6.0.2 with Wazebar 0.0.49 on a Mac, as well as Mac Firefox 17.0.1,but believe from the documentation that only area managers can filter on the City fields in the WME Color Highlights to find out which map elements are defined as being in Newport.

As some roads have been locked in this Rosehill suburb, I’m guessing that it might be a locked road segment(s) whose City might have been set to Newport. I’ve checked online with Australia Post and discovered there is a Newport in Victoria, Queensland and NSW. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the faulty City label above.

Also, there is a Rosehill, NSW and a Rosehill, QLD. Should I be using the “<Suburb>, <State Abbreviation in capitals>” format for City, given the issue of ambiguity, at least until Waze resolves the state issue for Australia?

12

I’ve just had a quick look - my guess is it is that roundabout right under the title… It’s been edited recently by tobian (27/12). Give it a few weeks and it will probably go away. It looks like the city names don’t update with every map update run, only every month or so.

I re-did all of Newport in QLD in early December as well - it also took a couple of map updates to straighten out.

13

Thanks dave_cairns,

I’ve gone through my suburb of Rosehill, NSW and tried to regularise the naming convention to “Rosehill, NSW” so that it may be differentiated from “Rosehill, QLD”. I think I’ve changed all Streets, Roundabout segments and Landmarks, but it is difficult since the search function on the WME doesn’t seem to be able to locate map objects that are named “Rosehill” and not “Rosehill, NSW”.

The whole region just south and east of Parramatta remains a horrible hotchpotch of city region colours: e.g. https://world.waze.com/editor/?lon=151.01214&lat=-33.82408&zoom=4&layers=BTTFFTTTTTTFTTTTTTTTTFT, implying a lack of accuracy or rigour in naming. As I go along I’m trying to fix these, but I’m not sure when the City layer is updated in the WME - is it instantly updated as I edit or does it have to wait for an map update?

Does anyone know whether the alternate street name is taken into account in the Waze client software? In the WME (Firefox Mac), searching for “Good St, Harris Park, Australia” finds entries for “Good St, Harris Park, Australia” and “Good Street, Harris Park, Australia”, even though I can’t find any road segment named “Good Street” and all the appropriate road segments are named as the abbreviated “Good St”. A search for “Good St, Rosehill, NSW, Australia” only brings up the suggestion of “Good St, Granville, NSW, Australia”: this is correct, but there should be a “Good St, Rosehill, NSW, Australia” as the suburb boundary line between Harris Park and Rosehill runs along this road and in theory, there are addresses in Good St that might be considered to be in either suburb.

A search on the iPhone Waze client (3.5.2.0) just gave the following results:
Search term: “Good St, Rosehill”
Result: First suggestion: “Rosehill St, Parramatta”, no other relevant results

Search term: “Good St, Rosehill, NSW”
Result: First Suggestion: “Good St, Granville, NSW”, no other relevant results

Search term: “Good St, Harris Park”
Result: First Suggestion: “Good St, Harris Park” (correct), Second suggestion: “Good Street, Harris Park”, no other relevant results

Search term: “Good St, Harris Park, NSW”
Result: First Suggestion: “Good St, Harris Park” (correct), Second suggestion: “Good Street, Harris Park”, no other relevant results

Unfortunately, as I’ve read in other Waze forums, the inability to reliably search for a street name is what seems to be putting off new users, preventing them becoming long term users. The second and later suggestions brought back by a search seemed to have little relevance to the original search string, where you would expect it to return the correct Street and City, then Street and nearby City, as alternative addresses. I understand this is beyond what Waze is currently designed (everyday travel between two pre-designated points) for but it is putting off new users who expect it to work like other GPS programs.

14

I don’t know if i’ve missed something in your post but i’ve found that the colour highlights script
http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=25806
does a good job at finding suburb names on street segments. updates instantly, no need to wait for the city polygons to be updated. You do have to be zoomed in far enough for it to show every road though

15

Thanks Dan,

The key to fixing the Cities field is the WME Color Highlights scripts as you said - but to use the most useful city scripts you have to be an Area Manager (Level 3 or above). So after your posting above I applied to become an area manager for the area that included Rosehill NSW, was granted it, and have now fixed up Rosehill so the city field for all elements reads “Rosehill, NSW” which should make any future Wazers in Rosehill, QLD happier but from the looks of that suburb it might take a while.

Using the same scripts, I have looked but can’t find anything named that could possibly make the city name “Newtown” still appear in the middle of Rosehill. I guess it might be one of those things that we might have to live with, as there are so many roads still to add, to name and to get the turn restrictions accurate before worrying about the odd anomaly.

16

Hi All,

I live in Toongabbie NSW, whenever I’m driving around, like in the posts mentioned above, I see Newport ALL the time. Newport is at least 20km away from Toongabbie/Parramatta etc and also appears in other States of Australia. If someone could cleanup Newport, that would be appreciated. Also I live on Oklahoma Ave, Toongabbie. Waze has Oklahoma Ave listed as the next suburb across (Girraween) - any idea if you folk can move entire suburbs for me? :smiley:

Thanks,

Thomas. (Newbie)

17

Fixed: you now live in Toongabbie. As far as I can make it every street that is in Toongabbie is now “Toongabbie, NSW” instead of just “Toongabbie”. There’s still a lot of suburb and street work to be done in the Eastern end of Toongabbie, but that should keep your local area good for now.

The WME Color Highlights Level 3 (only) scripts are invaluable for this, but you still have to do a lot of clicking and typing.

Area can be seen at https://world.waze.com/editor/?lon=150.9354&lat=-33.79583&zoom=4&layers=BFTFFTTTTTTFTTTTFTTTTFT

18

Awesome, how about removing Newport? That’s mighty annoying!

19

After a couple of weeks of intensive mapping I’ve come to the conclusion that the Incorrect Suburbs issue may only be resolvable by eliminating map elements directly from the database, that is, not using the WME.

I saw a problem come about when I was adding a new road, but had mistakenly selected the Landmark tool instead of the Road tool. When I drew the first point and double-clicked on the second, it created a tiny landmark, barely visible on the screen that seemed to be like a straight line instead of a polygon. It then took me a few minutes trying to click on this creation in order to delete it - but eventually I managed to. As a result of this I have come to the conclusion that the spurious City names might be artefacts of similar mistakes: tiny, almost-invisible landmarks that bear the spurious city name but may be almost impossible to select and thus almost impossible to delete in WME.

I also managed to find some streets’ Cities far from their proper home, such as Waterloo out in suburbs west of Parramatta. These must be creating problems for the correct locations of suburb labels on the map too.

I think the fix for this is for every map element in the following suburbs to bear the full “City, State” naming convention until what is left are the spurious elements that might be deleted by someone with access to the database directly. The suburbs that seem to be located in spurious places are:
• Waterloo
• Newport
• Newtown

Can anyone tell me the rationale for making streets that are named but have no city? I’m presuming that this was an artefact of when they were created and the editor not knowing which suburb the street might be part of, but had to put something in the City field in order to at save its Name. I can’t think of any street that should have a name but not a city.

20

Actually, incorrect city names on the map are an issue that’s caused by misnaming cities in the past (first lower-case names, or incorrect spelling) that were saved and then did not disappear even if the name was fixed (due to an issue with our filtering system).
If you encounter incorrect city names or “dead cities” (ones without any segments) - please let me know the exact name that shows on the map, and if possible - include a permalink.

We’ll then directly delete these dead/incorrect city names from the map.

-Yonatan :mrgreen: