I proposed that these projects be completed before any MapRaid is held in your state.
In the Great Lakes Regions, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio have State Managers, and Michigan and Ohio have established Statewide naming standards.
While Michigan settled on their standards a while ago, Ohio recently completed a very democratic voting process to establish theirs. You can read about their unanimous process in the Name Normalization for Ohio forum post.
Your state has discussed this in past in the County/State Road Standards forum post. I have closed that forum thread and redirected further discussion to this thread.
I would encourage Wisconsin editors and AMs to revive the discussion here and consider the following points.
Strive to use the nationwide U.S. standards as much as possible. While state specific exceptions are inevitable, please attempt to keep them to the absolute minimum.
Use the resources we have available to learn how your state names roads in both the text media and on signage.
Signage is usually the single best indicator for naming.
As examples, in Michigan their signs are all “M-###”. This same naming is used to describe their roads in text and also when spoken. Therefore they chose “M-###” to be their state highway naming standard. The Waze text-to-speech system also pronounces them as “emm ###”.
Louisiana similarly uses “LA-###” for their state highway naming standard.
Based on signage, spoken standards and common text usage, Ohio voted to adopt the following naming, largely based off of Waze national standards:
“SR-###” for “State Rte ###” (Note that “SH-###” and “State Highway ###” are not used in Ohio.)
“CH-###” for “County Highway ###” (Used only as necessary in some counties)
“CR-###” for “County Road ###”
“TH-###” for “Township Highway ###” (Used only as necessary in some counties)
“TR-###” for “Township Road ###”
(note that a few of these are submitted to Waze for TTS additions and have not yet been added due to TTS server upgrades)
If you would like to have all of your active AMs to vote on this, I will help devise the list and the voting system similar to what we used for Ohio.
Discussion of a SM for WI should be in another thread.
While there is no deadline, we should move on this to be resolved soon after the holidays.
If I add more to this opening post, I will mention it in this thread.
I am a native of Wisconsin, born in Milwaukee, family in Door County and up and down the La Crosse to Arcadia area, relatives up toward Superior, and went to grad school in Madison, so have some roots and have been around a while. I am out of state now.
Around a year ago (perhaps in Jan 14) I came to the Wisconsin map trying to make things better where I could, a virtual trip home. There was a lot to fix. I tried to contact a number of regular editors but at the time, there was not a lot of active participation. I also believe I posted about getting some standards going in WI. There were some comments around county roads at the time because these seem rather important in WI.
I started editing and may have left some things a bit of a jumble in places because I didn’t get back to finish what I was working on up north. I would advocate that the WI adopt the State Route XXX (SR-XXX) nomenclature for state highways. This seemed reasonable when I was editing here and I don’t know of any major signage issues that would be a problem. This is without regard to good knowledge of what goes on in Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan in case there is a regional preference. I really don’t like the “M-xxx” item in Michigan, but what the heck! The good thing about Waze is the flexibility.
I also think CR-XXX should be a standard for County Road. There are a lot of them. Having consistency across the state would be great.
Looking around some of the major cities like Madison, it appears that CR-# is fairly well implemented already. There seemed to be some consensus there is the original thread.
For state highways, I’m curious to see what is decided (betting on SH-# myself, but I don’t have any skin in the game). We should not attempt to standardize as a region or follow neighboring states though. Indiana, for example, would probably choose State “Road” of all things, Michigan’s “M-#” is non-negotiable from the perspective of TTS pronunciation, etc.
CR-XXX has been used in Wisconsin with success. The only problem that I have seen was the routes with the cardinal direction in them (CR-N, CR-S, CR-E and CR-W) The fix has been to put single quotes around the letter to make it CR-‘N’. This has worked.
As for the State Hwys, I think that they are going to be more for the SH-XXX format to say State Highway.
With Wisconsin not having a State Manager as of now, I have been helping out with unlocks and entering road closures for them.
State Highways
Wisconsin uses “Hwy” on highway signage (when they do not use shields). “State Hwy ##” is seen on roadside signage, when the highway does not have a “common” name.
In text (on the WisDOT and 511 Wisconsin websites) “WIS” is used. WIS is also used on new digital driver information signs (ex. the ones that say “WIS 24 … 12 mi … 14 min”)
I would rather see WIS used, but if we have a vote and SH- has the majority, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Those are the only 2 real options I see for Wisconsin state highways, as “route” is NEVER seen in the state (except for places where editors were under the belief that Waze should be under a truly “national” standard, which has since been disagreed on.)
County Highways
We all agreed that we didn’t like hearing “coh road”, or “coh highway” and CR- was kind of pushed on us by phantomblack, as most county trunk highways were imported as “Co Rd XX” and CH- was not a viable solution to us since TTS didn’t say “county highway”.
In text (on the websites listed above) these roadways are referred to as “County XX”. Highway information signage also just says “Hwy” for county highways. Signage at the overpasses and underpasses also just say “Hwy” Roadside signage is random throughout the state.
I would vote to change these to CH- as long as Gizmo gets his way and Waze adds it to TTS. I’m sure CTH- would be a pipe dream, unless ALL of us really wanted to use that. (besides, 2 out of 3 words isn’t bad :lol:)
Does anyone know why the wiki says that these should be with lower case letters? (ex. CR-‘n’) I asked this before in the forums and never got a response. Works just fine with upper case, as shown above.
phantomblack is from the Madison area. He, Lonewolf147 (Milwaukee), davenh (Milwaukee) and I (Green Bay) had a pretty good communication line with each other back when we started converting to CR-XXX
I am really for whatever the current active resident state editors are for here, but would like to also encourage considering a national trend as long as it isn’t too far from what the state is using. If it’s not a big difference, then why add to a larger variation in the Wazer’s experience across the country?
I am a big proponent of how Waze can allow customization for local state needs for all things from road names to how Places are used. But it should be for strong reasons. Too often it seems personal preference rather than a principle-based decision is made on some of these things Waze.
The whole County Road thing seems logically easy to me that CR-XXX covers almost all states. Rather than making up something totally different, why not adopt what some other state has used? Keep it simple. I totally get it if there is specific signage that would be less confusing, but it has to add some value to be worth the difference.
In any case, again, it ought to be local team input that makes the decision. I see now that BigBear is now state manager (congratulations!). Maybe you all can encourage other local editors to engage in a discussion with representation from across the state…
Just a quick note on this thread, KB_Steveo and myself are newly promoted State Managers for Wisconsin. He and I are already starting to discuss things and we’ll be sure to keep everyone else up to date on our ideas and such.
As I’m now trudging through a ton of awesome SM available material, as well as some backlogged wiki reading, I may hold off on stronger comments on these issues for a few days while I get caught up.
Hold off for a bit. Gizmo is going to run some scripts that will do some mass-renaming once he gets a chance to program it. Once that is done, we’ll just need to do cleanup as we find missed pieces. I’ll post (here and the GHO) when it’s done.
Nothing really. It has been submitted to Sketch and should be run very soon now. This renaming will NOT catch every segment because it will be looking for specific spellings. So be aware that you will find random segments that will need to be manually changed.
I haven’t created anything to track this. Mostly because it’s been pretty random for me and KB with the mass renaming. Quite often I’ll find a road and just start following it, and that catches some of the side roads. I could add something to the FC spreadsheet, would be easy enough to copy all the counties over to a new sheet on it. Would that work for you?