I have a question about the naming of housing developments or cul-de-sacs. What is the standard practice for a development without a name, or where no name can be found on street view imagery?
I can think of three possible options, but I would like to some more input before I start working on Monaghan town center and the surrounding built up area.
Leave unnamed - and check back at a later stage for updated street view imagery if it would ever get updated. Doing this will probably mean the segments won’t appear to the client.* Check “None” for street name - and check back at a later stage for a name. If the user searches for the street in the client, and a Google result is returned, they can at least be navigated into the development.* Set the name as the townland it runs through as usual for country roads - Doing this will maybe cause confusion if the houses are supposed to be together, so care would have to be taken, but may cause issues if the group of houses crosses a boundary between two townlands.
As you say, naturally getting street names from signs seen on street view is the ideal approach, however assuming that it’s either out of date (because the development is newer than the SV images) or there’s no visible sign:
I wouldn’t ever leave it unnamed unless this is just a first pass; I sometimes create road segments and leave them unnamed and then come back later to finish them off; if I see a red road segment I take that to mean “editing not finished here!” * Please only check “None” on the street name as an absolute last resort. The name won’t be visible in the client or on Live Map, although at least a Google result (assuming has the right name in the right place…) will navigate the user there. * Sometimes housing developments’ names have something in common with the surrounding townland name, but whether or not this is the case, I think is a bit confusing.* I sometimes use Eircode to get street names, because it’s supposed to be based on the definitive list of addresses as used by An Post.* One confusing thing I’ve seen quite a few times is housing estates (especially larger ones) that have a master name for the entire development but then smaller parts of the development also have their own names. For example, imagine a (made up) development called “Forest Heights” with each part named something like “The Elms”, “The Oaks”,
“Sycamore Close”, “Chestnut Avenue”, etc etc etc. There must be dozens of roads called “The Elms” around the country … anyway, in this kind of situation, I’d give the entrance road segment the name of the overall development and then give each sub-part its own name. This seems to just happen in very large developments, and in smaller developments every segment has the same name. This way, users get instructed to “turn left (or whatever) into Forest Heights” and then get navigated into the correct sub-part of the development, getting correct road names (that should match any signs they see) along the way.
Good idea with the Eircode David, I’ll give this a try! I personally find it more practical to leave the segments unnamed, and allow me to explain why. Unnamed segments will drag editor’s attention, and someone will eventually know the correct name. Might even be the future me
With so many new estates popping up lately (especially around Dublin), I use a different approach to find street names. Look for the brochure, find the Site plan, add all roads, name them according to the Site plan, mark them as Private, and change to Street as soon as they become available
Edit: the amount of streets called The Close, The Crescent, The Elms etc is indeed annoying! It’s as if the designers of the estate actually dedicated less than 5’ on the naming.
This also happens in Northern Ireland, it’s actually quite common! I live in the townland of Tullyherron, and there are streets around me like “Tullyherron Pk” etc, and I can think of countless more townlands here where this is the case. I don’t find it too confusing, in fact I quite like it, but maybe because it’s all sign posted here. On some newer developments/signs, you’ll see the townland name written underneath as well.
Thanks for the link to the Eircode website. Of the few searches I did, the street names were in Irish. Maybe I just got them by chance.
Should Irish names be added to the map? For example, Cnoc Na Gréine in Tednavet in Monaghan (H18 VE22) seems to be the only name available for that street. (At the time I did this area, I checked “None”).
Aha - I was wondering why you seemed to be creating lots of unnamed segments - now I understand - what you do sounds quite reasonable.
Yeah, I do that too. It’s a bit fiddly mapping streets from the brochure when they don’t show up on the satellite view yet, but an approximation is probably fine until it opens and there’ll be GPS tracks to use, or when you might have a chance to visit it in person.
[/quote]
Longer answer: the names on the map should match what would appear on a street sign (if there was one…). If the street sign would say “Cnoc Na Gréine” then that’s what we should have on the map. If the street sign would be in English and Irish (like most road and city names with official street signs), then generally we show the English name (but we can add the Irish name as an alternate name).
If you’re mapping in a Gaeltacht area, then all city or road names on signs will generally be only in Irish (so we should show what the signs show), although builders/developers who name developments might have a different opinion…
Where Irish names do appear (which seems to happen for some developments, even outside Gaeltacht areas) I usually fix the capitalisation (my years of Irish in school are good for something ) - so I would write “Cnoc Na Gréine” as “Cnoc na Gréine” because the “na” is an article (like “the” in English). That detail is probably debatable; it just looks more correct to me…
As for how Waze TTS will pronounce Irish-language names, well… it seems to mangle Anglicised place names badly enough as it is (even straightforward names like “Delgany” don’t quite come out right) - but there’s not a whole lot we can do about that. Maybe one day there’ll be a field for setting pronunciation phonetically or something. One day…
We can only hope, it would be very useful for Ireland north and south! It probably isn’t worth going around and filling out the incorrect TTS form for each one it plays incorrectly. It’s sometimes amusing hearing it have a go at saying some townland names
I would add other Irish eclipsis (mB, gC, nD, bhF, nG…) and (dT*, gC*, hA*, hÁ*, hE*…)
The script WME Validator Localization for Ireland used to detect all the incorrect spelling.
An adapted version for WMEMagic would probably be written…
I think we got other Ireland-specific customisations for WME Validator too (that were baked directly in to Validator, before you could do customisation plugins). I forget what they are, but I think we asked for (and got) customisations for our different conventions for road naming (such as cardinal directions for motorway segments not being wrapped in parentheses or all minor highways having names that start with Rnnn).
… anyway, in this kind of situation, I’d give the entrance road segment the name of the overall development and then give each sub-part its own name. This seems to just happen in very large developments, and in smaller developments every segment has the same name. This way, users get instructed to “turn left (or whatever) into Forest Heights” and then get navigated into the correct sub-part of the development, getting correct road names (that should match any signs they see) along the way.
