Recently, I saw a small settlement just outside of a large town. Only the skeleton of primary streets and some peripheral streets had been given the city label.
The city polygon looks correct. Most of the streets themselves were ‘no city’.
As I understand it, the city field does not affect navigation, so is this a good idea? Seems to me much easier to adjust the polygon as needed, and there is less scope for typo’s in the city field.
This is something we thought about in London for a while. I think there is some merit in it but also issues such as other editors coming along and “filling in the blanks”. As there is less and less to do in some places, we are seeing editors do anything to get points.
I try (but often fail) to keep the main roads as no city through villages and towns in the country so as to avoid name creep (or having to put in spurious nodes just to terminate the city area).
But this is just my personal view.
This is indeed a quick way to get a town/village on the map, but Waze is looking to provide it’s own address search facility, so ultimately all streets need to be named and in the correct city.
Also, the majority of users can’t even see the city polygons, nor will they care about them. Don’t need to worry too much about getting the shape right.
Ok. Thanks
Another place where the city name can have an effect is in traffic reports. Now obviously that’s less of an issue for villages, but it has a big effect in urban areas.
If the segment has a city name, you’ll get a report saying something like “Heavy Traffic on the A21, Bromley”. Without a city name, you’ll get variations like “between A and B”, “near A” and “in the neighbourhood of A”.
That last one is a killer, because “in the neighbourhood of” takes up so much room that you never see the actual city name"! I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that happens when the segment with no city name appears within a city polygon, as opposed to very close to one.
It’s one of the major reasons we eliminated “London” from the map - because reports like “traffic on the A21, London” didn’t tell you which bit of the 20-odd miles of the A21 in London had the problem.
I’m on the fence (i.e. confused :lol: ) about city-naming major roads. Another “urban-only” problem is that they often form the boundary between different city/suburbs, with each side of the road belonging to a different area. Those, I generally leave blank, but in isolated settlements, I generally city-name the segments within the boundaries.
Hi,
I find most small towns and villages will have a marker sign on the main through roads and usually (not always) on other smaller roads entering said town/village.
Given that info, it is easy to either use the nearest junction or add a point to correctly assign a “city” name to the roads outside the town/village (null) or town/village name within the boundaries.
Not rocket science but it can be damn laborious!
Des. . . 
There is a downside to not marking each segment with the city name.
When arriving at your destination Waze will display “Street, City” as the final instruction. Obviously segments without a city defined will not do that.
Examples below:
The OS Locator data is also useful for probing the boundaries of an area. Usually where a road crosses an area boundary (either a local boundary within a larger named area - e.g. cities and larger towns - or at the extremities of a smaller named area - villages/smaller towns) there’ll be a corresponding split in the data. If you’re using the WMEOD script, the bounding boxes for these roads can give a pretty good visual indication as to where the boundary is crossed…
Indeed, 99% of the time OS Locator Data does the job nicely. 
For the other 1% I use the Royal Mail Postcode search. :shock:
Really? In the sticks, the postal address can stretch for miles away from the place itself… Would that not be a problem?
I use dowsing, it’s more accurate.
Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2
More for establishing an exact boundary of two joined “cities” when OS isn’t clear. In the sticks you can see where a village ends from the aerials.
Yarp. That would make sense.