From my understanding, Indiana has a somewhat unique county road naming system. Our 300N and 450W are not typically found outside of our state. Given this, how would we like to name these? I’ve come across N Co Rd 800 E intersecting E 325 N, for example. I’ve heard both versions used in conversation (“Take state road 13 to county road 800 East, and turn right. You’ll follow that until you hit 300 North.”) In addition, according to the US Road Naming conventions, CR will trigger the TTS engine to read “County Road”, so at the least, I would argue that “Co Rd” should be set to CR.
To go along with that, how do we want to display state roads on the map? IN-XXX is a fairly common standard outside of Waze, but it appears the map has been fairly standardized on “State Rd XXX”. Depending on region, you might hear “state road”, “state highway”, or “state route”. Michigan has standardized on M-XXX (as well as a few other non-neighboring states using their own initials, such as LA for Louisiana). Others (Illinois, Ohio) have gone “State Rte”. Kentucky is “State Hwy” (although that appears to be a possible default), and SR-XXX is used elsewhere in the country.
Waze has both of these defined in the wiki: State Rd XXX and County Hwy XXX. Personally, I’ve never seen County Hwy used, but I haven’t driven the county roads of Southern Indiana…so I have no idea if that’s used in that direction or not. My preference for the numbered roads would be to follow the signs and use numbers and directionality only (N 800 E, W 500 S).
Since I’m discussing these, I’ll also throw out US Highways…it appears that the US convention isn’t necessarily being followed. From what I can tell, these should be named US-XXX. In my editable region, I have “US Hwy 20”, but as I’m now looking closer at naming conventions, I’m thinking this should be US-20. Just outside of my current editable region is “US Hwy 6”, which I’m now thinking should be US-6.
Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. My 2¢:
Admins have promised me that they will eventually change all the “US Hwy X” over to “US-X”, so I don’t think renaming all of them manually needs to be a priority at this time.
“County Hwy” is just the default on the list in the wiki; feel free to change it to whatever you wish. I agree that calling the roads simply “N 800 E” etc will be clear and anyone who’s driven much in Indiana will know what “north eight hundred east” means.
SR- and SH- were suggested as defaults for the type of road that INDOT oversees, but neither of those prompts the TTS to say “State Rd” which is what it should say in Indiana. “IN-37” will come out as “in thirty seven” which sounds a lot like “in half a mile turn right”, so until someone who has clearance can get the TTS to make IN sound like “Indiana” or “Indiana State Rd” or something else useful, I don’t know that there’s anything substantially better than the current names.
No one at Waze has that clearance or has ever demonstrated an interest in managing how TTS pronounces things on a local basis, so don’t count on that that happening.
Good to know. I only recently started looking at naming conventions, having primarily been focused on just making the map work, so I only realized this was the case today.
I’m inclined to leave off the CR/County Rd/Co Rd/County Hwy altogether and go with “N 800 E” or whatever, as, like you said, anyone who has driven much in Indiana should recognize it for what it is. That said, if anyone else would like to standardize on something, I’ll be happy to follow a majority opinion so that we can have a single convention.
Good to know. With that, I’d be inclined to stick with “State Rd” unless/until the TTS engine can handle SR-or possibly even IN-. Given your last note, I won’t hold my breath.
Most, but not all, of the county roads in Howard county (Kokomo area) currently have the “Co Rd” prefix, e.g. “Co Rd W 250 S.” I tend to agree with ndgeek that it would make more sense to leave this off.
I have seen some county roads in the southern part of the state (where the geography does not lend itself to a grid-based road layout) where they are simple numbers, like 158. I think that labeling these as CR-XXX would make the most sense, although I’m not positive how the locals refer to them.
Areas in NE and eastern Indiana that I’m familiar with generally do not use a CR or Co Rd prefix in labeling the county roads. “N 800 E” is the norm, both in Waze and on the road signs. While Waze can read the “Co Rd” prefix in areas where the roads already have that in their name, as editing progresses, my vote would be consistent with the previous comments here, and remove that part of the label. It’s cleaner and easier to continue to use the simpler N 800 E type label, and it would be a lot of unproductive busy work to make a change.
As mapcat has said, we should not depend on TTS changes for local differences in naming.
I would however encourage the use of “SR-xxx” in ramp naming as the best method to both maintain consistency with most of the country and to shorten the displayed text, as ramps names can get long.
Yes I know that TTS will say “State Route” instead of “State Road”. I’m sure most people will not have an issue with that. While states like Michgian can use a single letter and number such as “M-52” in a ramp name (and elsewhere) and it will be pronounced as the letter with the numbers 52, this can not be done with Indiana as mapcat mentioned, as the two letters “IN” will be pronounced as the word “in”.
We are still working on getting Waze to pronounce every capitalized two letter state abbreviation as their state. When or IF this will ever happen is unknown. Therefore we should be wary of making any mass changes that may never be supported.
I have been working on a TTS project for a couple of years now, and only a couple of our suggested changes from that project have been implemented. At our Waze Meet-up in Israel, I was “assigned” to another Waze staff member who was to take over the TTS issue. The issues I submitted immediately after the meet-up were accepted, however there has not been any feedback since.
I do agree with others that “Co Rd” or “CR” not be used in the county road names. As Bruce mentioned, “Co Rd” will be pronounced, but not as “County Rd”. It will pronounce “Co” as a the word “co” and will not expand it to the word “County”.
If a consensus for Indiana does wants “County Road” in the country road names, then “CR” should be used as TTS will indeed say, “County Road”. However this will likely require a massive renaming of road in Indiana, which I do not feel is a good choice.
GizmoGuy thanks for the confirmation on how “Co Rd” would be pronounced in TTS. As I get into new areas (for me) editing, I’m finding more and more roads in IN labeled “Co Rd 60” which I’ll gradually rename “CR-60”.
Ah, I didn’t realize this page existed because the “Indiana” link in https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Road_naming_by_state didn’t point to it. I went ahead and created a redirect from “Indiana” to “Indiana mapping resources.”
