Hello United Kingdom from the colonies
I am A CM for New Zealand (Primary) and Australia
In New Zealand we have modelled our “city fields” based on your UK style
In Australia we have modelled the “city field” as the rest of Europe does it.
I personally like the UK style better
Does the UK style work well? and has there been any thoughts of changing to the what I call “European style”?
What is the European style?
Yes, we’re quite happy with how our cities are named, and hadn’t considered any other way to do it. We’re just waiting for Waze to give us States so that we can get rid of the “(County)” suffixes from most of our names.
Sorry about the reply delay (forgot)
I should only talk about he differences between New Zealand and Australia because that’s what I know for sure.
As a rule of thumb (“city field”)
In New Zealand all cities except the 3 biggest are all labelled with there real city name. These cities or towns many times do have suburbs but we ignore this except for the 3 biggest, they are subdivided by suburbs. All roads between cities have no city label.
In Australia the city field is entered always. They hardly ever use the real city name instead they use the suburb name, In rural areas they use the regional name.
The results are quite different
In theory the Australian method should be better for street level navigation but the down side is the map doesn’t look very good.
In NZ we are still hanging out for extra fields, in the mean time we just use Google search.
Almost all navigation searches in the UK will probably be via postcode, rather than street and city name, so having the ‘correct’ city name is largely irrelevant. The current naming strategy is to match village and suburb boundaries to the road signs, or the general area that people know. They’ll probably work for address searches to, I imagine.
We don’t give rural roads any city, as we prefer to see spaces between our cities. There’s very little need to address a rural road, and postcodes will general find them without a city name. Freeways certainly don’t need address data.
Another use for city names is for traffic reports, so having small cities is beneficial. It wouldn’t be much use of Waze said there was traffic on the “M25 near London”, as that could be anywhere. (London is big, and the M25 goes all the way around it. Other cities have similar arrangements)
For this reason, some of our large cities are split into suburbs.
One of the current issues we have with the city field is uniqueness, requiring us to add the name of the county as a suffix when village name appears more than once. When we eventually get States, this problem will mostly disappear.
There’s a discussion happening at the moment amongst champs about this very thing, and many are calling for an extra address field to be added below City to handle smaller localities, suburbs, etc. This would allow the map to have more, smaller ‘cities’ with without having to have long names.
+1
Where do you get post codes from?
Have you got a link on how you do this? I’m interested if this could apply to NZ
Postcodes are primary for delivering mail, but they do uniquely identify almost every street. Waze have some external database of postcode along with geo coordinates, but I don’t know what that source is.
If NZ has a similar system, and if you can find a free geo database of codes, then you can try asking Waze to incorporate it into their systems. I’m afraid I don’t know any more than that.
That system appears is nothing like NZ
I think the NZ post code works more like the US system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_New_Zealand
173 Park Road
Johnsonville
Wellington 6004
For NZ this is what we would like to see in Waze
-Street Number
-Street Name
-Suburb
-City
-Post Code