“The next switch is scheduled for Sunday (August 26). the updated map will contain all your edits as of August 19.” [link]
Oh yes. Should have known that. All my edits are after the 19th. Still good excuse for a Welsh field trip next month!
I’m doing some tests on city names in the Wandsworth area and I’d like to see how that pans out before deciding on the way forward. Probably have to wait for at least one more update yet.
Sounds good.
Let’s know what happens D
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Although a couple of the London AMs have exchanged some PMs, I wanted to bring this back to the public forum for discussion. Hopefully we can get some sort of consensus :lol: and get something decided. I also hope this might turn out to be useful for some of the other UK cities.
First of all, there are several points to bear in mind, mainly based on my observations & opinions of how things currently work.
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City names as viewed in the client aren’t particularly useful. Whilst it’s nice to have them I don’t think they aid navigation much - there’s more important info to concentrate on. I consider the “awful polygons” to be a non-issue. If you use the map editors colour scheme, you should know why they look bad anyway.
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Traffic reports will show either “<road name>, <city name>” for roads that have a city name set or “<road name> between <city1> and <city2>” with no city set. They will also show “<road name> in the neighbourhood or ???”. That should probably be <city> there - but “in the neighbourhood of” is so long I’ve never seen what comes after it!
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Major highways & freeways are more important to longer distance navigation. Somebody travelling from a distance will not care whether a jam on the A21 is in Bellingham or Rushey Green - indeed they may not know those local names. Catford is sufficiently accurate for them. Anyone local will recognise the area on the map that appears along with the report. Also, I believe that Waze “prefers” higher category roads for longer trips, so these roads appear more often for those users.
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Smaller roads (minor highways & below) can often be contained entirely within one postcode, yet be quite long enough that using the postcode name as the city field can be unhelpful.
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The only official and useful source of city names/boundaries I can find is the post code names. There are several official boundaries available (wards, electoral, council etc) but - at least for my area - every one disagrees in major ways with what everyone would consider the actual locality names.
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Whatever we decide, however clearly we explain it in the Wiki, inexperienced editors will mess it up to some extent. That’s the price we pay - inexperienced editors will never become experienced editors if we don’t give them a chance to edit and then help them improve. If we can improve the situation we should do it - regardless of whether someone will mess it up.
So: based on those observations & thoughts, this is what I propose: -
All major highway segments should have a city name set based on the post code that segment is in. There are some motorway segments in London - I’m unure about those so I welcome opinions. The UK Wiki entirely fails to mention city names when naming roads.
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All minor highway & below segments should have a “local” name set. Some of these will be the same as the post code name (e.g. Catford in the centre of the post code, but “Bellingham” to the south). I cannot see any way to do this strictly “by rule”. I think we will have to depend on local knowledge. Looking at the OS Opendata map at low zoom gives a good guide, and the London borough boundaries may be useful. If we leave segments without a city, someone will just come along & fill them in anyway.
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All A & B roads should include the road name (if there is one). I know this is already in the Wiki, but it hasn’t been consistently applied. I know that the A20, for example, only very recently acquired some of the road names.
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We beg Waze to change “in the neighbourhood of” to “near”. It’s useless as it is.
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We divide the London area up amongst ourselves by post code and get it done. Perhaps a few of us could each try our “local” postcode first and see how it looks after an update. If we’re happy, then perhaps post codes could be given out one at a time to trusted editors who ask to help. People with limited areas (like myself) would only be able to do some post codes, but I’m sure some of the editors with CM status wouldn’t mind earning some points by cleaning up an area. Or we can hand out some temporary AM privileges.
Well, that’s what I think. Sorry it’s so long - it’s been on my mind quite a bit. I now look forward to you all pointing out my mistakes :oops: and telling me exactly what you think :shock: !
I not sure I disagree with you. Can you explain the difference between:
and
[*For the purposes of this post, Cities include Towns too]
I think Iain is suggesting that trunk roads be named by the cities* they pass through, while local roads are named according to the local areas (either villages or suburbs). This is so reports on trunks will refer to well known places, while reports on local roads will be more detailed.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure if I like it. Here are some random thoughts:
- more labels on the map, with no control over which ones actually appear.
- some postcode areas are massive, far bigger than the city it serves.
- some trunk roads go around a city, so the label will be displaced.
- what about the centre of a city, which really should be named as such?
Not quite sure how much postcode you want to use anyway. 2 letters? 2 letters + numbers? The postcode for York (YO) is massive, and covers most of North Yorkshire. There are 7 or so YOXX postcodes within York.
This scheme might only be useful for London. Here’s a map: http://www.freemaptools.com/uk-postcode-map.htm
Ah like SW18. Right follow now. Need more coffee. Possible. Do people know postcodes better than localities?
I’ll use SE13 as an example - if you look at streetmap.co.uk it’s easy to see what I mean. SE13 is the Lewisham postcode, so the all primary highway segments in this area would be named “Lewisham”.
For local names, the northern half of the area would have the segments named “Lewisham”; the SW corner would be “Ladywell” and the SE corner would be “Hither Green” - and these local names would not necessarily be bound by the post code boundary. For example, what I would call “Ladywell” also encompasses some of SE4 (Brockley)
It’s a big bloody post. I’m sure once you’ve read it all, you will be sure. 
I am, at the moment, only suggesting this for London - where the “London” name is simply useless. In fact we’ve all been getting rid of it - when I tell people about Waze I tell them “I deleted London from the map” because I started this off. 
I would hope this would be useful for other large cities where the overall city name is similarly too broad. But I simply don’t know any of them well enough to say. I used to be a London despatch rider - hence why I’m willing to speak with some authority. In London, at least, we have a set of official boundaries (the postcodes) that is (a) granular enough to be useful and (b) corresponds closely with most peoples opinions about what the areas are actually called.
I am only talking about using the first part of the post code (i.e. YO01, YO11 etc) - because those are the old Royal Mail “post towns” and are, I think well recognised. Once you take the second part of the post code you’re looking at how the local sorting offices are located and how they divide up their delivery areas. (Aside: I’m getting old. :lol: I can remember when I was young and they had the campaign to get everyone to start using that second half. I’m sure it had a special name, but I can’t remember what it was!)
The freemaptools link looks like it only goes down to the level of the first 2 letters (i.e. SE, SW etc.) - in London at least, so it’s not granular enough.
Now I’m not sure that would work round here. SW18 is the postcode for Wandsworth (ie town not borough) and Earlsfield and Southfields (and little other bits). You would want to distinguish these for traffic jam reports. I would not agree with labelling all the majors as in Wandsworth. SW17 is the Tooting area, again containing quite a few “localities”. Have I misunderstood again?
The Codepoint Open dataset from the OS OpenData collection contains point co-ords for the individual postcodes, so it should be possible to use that excessively granular data as a base from which to construct the inbetween level of granularity we’re after.
Since the dataset only gives a single co-ord per postcode we’d have to do a distance based lookup against the road being located, so there could be some minor blurring of the boundaries if a road segment which in reality falls into postal area A appears, because of its proximity to the points in the dataset, to fall into postal area B, but I think that overall the accuracy ought to be good enough if we decide that using the first half of the postcode is a good idea…
Part of the problem (as I understand it) is Waze will use the nearest place for in the neighbourhood of.
so the key example I have is the A282 dartford tunnel, it nearly always states Traffic in the neighbourhood of Stone.
Now I am pretty sure most non locals will not know where Stone is, in reality it should be in the neighbourhood of Dartford.
Has anyone contacted waze to suggest improvements to this area, so maybe it will look for towns within a one or two mile Radius, and rather than chose the closest, chose the biggest.
Is this any use? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_postal_district
It’s all down to compromise. If we label every segment with the postcode name, traffic reports aren’t granular enough. On the other hand, if we label every segment with a locality, only local people will recognise the name. I’m sure I read somewhere that Waze “prefers” major roads on longer routes - the sort of routes used by people who don’t know the area.
Another factor is taking judgement out of the equation. Where I think Bellingham ends and Downham starts is up to me - there’s no “official” boundary and the next editor who comes along may disagree for perfectly good reasons. For major roads (which might be considered “national resources”), I think we should use a rule that has a definitive source - and postcode boundaries are the only thing I have seen that fits that definition and gives a result that (I think) everyone can agree with.
Yes, I’ve seen that data somewhere. I agree with everything you say regarding the problem of it providing points for the centres rather than boundaries.
I presume you’re suggesting either passing a massaged data set to Waze to have them set the city names, or maybe adding it to the “WME to OS Link” tool so that it can suggest a city name as well as a road name? If that’s the case I could go along with either approach. Even if there are minor boundary inaccuracies, the ease of getting “very nearly correct” names would far outweigh them.
If it ends up just being a manual process - well I don’t think it will be all that difficult. Since I’m only proposing to use postcode names for the major roads, you could find each road’s post code boundaries using any of the online mapping tools that show the boundaries. You can then “locate” the segments on the boundaries and work inwards pretty quickly from there using “select entire street”.
That’s an interesting idea :o
If it could be made to work, then we would “locate” all minor roads (and get reports like “Traffic on Southend Lane, Bellingham”) whilst leaving all major roads un-located (“Traffic on A21 between Bellingham and Catford”).
However that requires us to clearly decide how we would like it to work, explain it clearly to Waze HQ, get them to agree it’s a good idea, let them work out how to actually do it (if it can be done), wait for them to implement and release it, get all our city names correct, wait for an update, see if it works!
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea or not worth pursuing. However, I can’t honestly say that I think it’s likely to happen except over a considerable amount of time - and I’d like to get things sorted now.
I’ve been using Waze for less than 3 months. I started by not entering city names at all because it wasn’t clear what I should use - and in London, at least, it’s still not clear. I’d rather be putting something is as I go now, knowing I’m following some sort of rule - even if we change our minds in 6 months time and have to change them all again.
I’ve been using Waze for 18 months now. I’m still not sure which London names to use.
Hi,
Just to throw something else into the mix for you to throw out or consider…
Congestion charge zone. Should the entry/exit roads be marked as “Toll Roads”?
Waze will navigate people through it if it doesn’t know about the charge for those people who have selected to avoid toll roads…
Des. . .
Already done Des!