Can we document some naming standards for South African users?
Street names
Street suffixes
City name (Suburb names?)
That sort of thing. So far I’m working off the UK standard in the Wiki, but perhaps we should create our own for South Africa?
I believe zarf is busy working on a standard ZA naming convention, and I’m sure he’ll post something here shortly on that topic.
In the mean time…
What we’re doing in Cape Town is using the “City” field to enter the suburb name as well, so basically something like this:
City: Newlands, Cape Town
We are not naming the little ‘suburblets’ (or sub-suburbs) like “Barbarossa” in Constantia and “Hiddingh” in Newlands Because that is just way too much detail.
And naturally, not using the Suffix, because that will make “Road Main” out of “Main” for main road. Instead just use the “Rd” (for road) in the Street name. Other types:
• Way
• Ave (avenue)
• Cr (crescent)
• Cl (close)
• St (street)
• Ln (lane)
• Wk (walk)
• Dr (drive)
• Blvd (Boulevard)
- All I can think of right now
I saw that in Cape Town, the suburb names. Pity Waze doesn’t have a separate field for that. It’s going to create a real editing headache if they eventually DO add a separate field. Renaming all the roads again :\
• Pl (place)
I think Blyzz has covered most of the street abbreviations. Another one I’ve used, though I’m not 100% comfortable with, is Pkwy for Parkway, as in “Liesbeeck Parkway, Black River Parkway, etc”. For freeways, I haven’t abbreviated at all, partly because there doesn’t seem to be a common abbreviation (“Fway” just seems wrong), and partly because the freeways tend to be long and straight enough that the need for abbreviations isn’t as great. Another road type I haven’t abbreviated is Circle. With Cl & Cr already taken for Closes & Crescents, there doesn’t seem to be a good widely-used abbreviation for Circle, unless anyone has suggestions? Don’t say o 
As for other conventions… As I’ve mentioned to alan_zimm & Blyzz, I did intend to start a thread (just like this one!) in which to discuss conventions with the intention of working the conclusions up into a wiki article along the lines of the UK’s naming convention article on the wiki, so thanks for getting the ball rolling, pevans_om!
If there’s one thing that’s critically important, I think it’s the use of “Suburb, City” in the city field for large metro areas like Cape Town, Joburg, Pretoria Durban, PE etc. Looking at an old Cape Town map book I see twenty different "First Ave"s and another ten firsts distributed between Rds, Crs, Sts etc. If you’re doing a search for an address in First Ave and there are twenty different ones, all just labelled “First Ave, CityName” in Waze you’ll never know which one you want. As far as the actual convention is concerned, I started off following the UK wiki’s advice and went with Suburb (City), but soon realised that doesn’t look as sensible on the map or in search results as Suburb, City. Unless anyone has any strong feelings to the contrarym I’d like to propose that as the standard convention for SA.
It’s a serious pain in the ass to have to go back and rename all the cities for roads you’ve already created, but it’s worth it in the end. Apart from searches, another reason to be very careful with city names is the Waze automatically calculates a polygon surrounding all the roads with the same city name and uses that to (a) automatically pre-populate the city field for new roads drawn or driven inside the polygon and (b) show the suburb or city name on the live map and in the mobile clients. Unfortunately in the early days of Cape Town wazing someone went and drew the N1 all the way to Paarl and the N2 all the way to Somerset West and labelled both roads “Cape Town”. The result is that there were tons of roads in far flung parts of Paarl, Stellenbosch, Somerset West, etc. that were automatically assigned a city name of Cape Town when people named them. I’m currently on a mission to eradicate the city name “Cape Town” from any lurking road segments that still have it. Initially I thought we should reserve that name for the CBD, but since all the other suburb names that appear on the map describe their suburbs better I’ve since gone and changed the city name for every road in the CBD to “Central Cape Town” (note no comma, since there’s no suburb called “Central”).
There’s lots more to discuss before we get to a wiki article, but hopefully there’s enough to spur debate here already. Let the comments roll on!
That sounds pretty good to me. PE doesn’t have very many roads done yet, so I don’t face too much of a task updating suburbs.
Another thought is around Route numbers. I’ve started adding them in brackets after the road name.
I.e. Heugh Rd (M9)
Is that acceptable do you think?
Interesting enough I came across this:
http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/usps_abbreviations.html#suffix
…it may help with suffix abbreviations.
From that you would have:
Circle Cir
Parkway Pkwy (alt. PkWay, Pky?)
Freeway Fwy (alt. FrWay, Frwy?)
I’ve been using hypens for route number suffixes, eg: “Main Rd - M4”. Space hyphen space and space bracket bracket both add three characters to the length of the road name, so there’s no difference there. I think the reason I went with the hyphenated form was partly an influence from the UK wiki where they seemed to be using brackets for directional indicators, and partly because the bracketed form looks funny when you select a road in Cartouche because Cartouche sticks an extra set of brackets around the whole road name. Those are probably fairly weakish reasons not to bracket route numbers, but I think the third and more convincing reason is that when you’re dealing with major roads outside urban areas where they don’t have a another name besides their route number, it’s probably more natural to label the road as “N2” than “(N2)”, but if you’re bracketing your route numbers then consistency would demand brackets for “(N2)” too.
Not sure if all that makes sense to other people too?
That makes sense. You’d then have the “N1 (N)” or “M2 (W)”
I see the UK have the road number as a prefix - “M9 - Heugh Rd”.
Your example has it as a suffix - “Heugh Rd - M9”.
Reasoning?
The vast majority of roads that have both a name and an assigned route number are likely to be M routes in the metro areas and for the most part the locals that use those roads most are more likely to know those roads by their names than by their numbers. Putting the name before the number keeps the emphasis on the name, with the route number as less important extra information. Thanks to Waze, I can now easily tell you off the top of my head where all the M/N1-9 roads in the Cape Town area lie (actually, I would have been able to place 1-7 even before I started Wazing) but with the exception of the N1 & N2 (and possibly the M3 & M5 in their freeway sections) they’re all much more meaningful to me when referenced by their name, so I prefer “Main Rd - M4” over “M4 - Main Rd”.
When it comes to double-digit M routes, their M numbers are definitely not something I was particularly aware of. Lots of people will know what you’re talking about if you tell them to take Rhodes Drive from Newlands to Hout Bay, but I doubt terribly many know it as the M63. I still think it’s worth including it though because the council helpfully provides M63 route markers at fairly regular intervals along the route and if you’re unfamiliar with the road then that’s a useful confirmation that you’re still on the right track.
As for directional suffixes, I’ve only attached those to freeways so far (even when minor M routes have separate North & South carriageways) and I’ve tended not to abbreviate them, so I’ve used a suffix of “Westbound” or “Eastbound” for clarity. I’ve justified the longer form to myself because freeways tend to be rendered nice and big in the phone clients and so there’s lots of space for the whole of “Eastbound” instead of “(E)”, but I have to admit that when you I subsequently added the road names as prefixes things have become rather clunky… eg: The N1 from its start to the Koeberg Rd interchange is techincally Table Bay Boulevard, and the N2 goes by the name of Eastern Boulevard from its start until Hospital Bend and then Settlers Way from there to the R300 interchange. “Table Bay Blvd - N1 Eastbound” is pretty clunky, and “Simon van der Stel Freeway - M3 Northbound” is even worse! I’m open to suggestions on a better standard, but if I had to choose between dropping name prefixes or full directional suffixes on freeways, I think I’d drop the names. “M3 Northbound” isn’t much longer than a typical suburban road name and it’s useful, but frankly I don’t really care what the N2’s other names are, so I’ve only added them for consistency.
Another topic that I think we need to discuss is when to use Waze’s different road types (primary street, minor/major highway & freeway). I had a long discussion IRL with Blyzz about it this morning, and I think we’ve found the answers, but I’ll have to wait for tomorrow to write that up!
Route numbers aren’t maybe that important to the locals, but they help visitors a whole lot. Example: Here in PE the M9 route winds you through 3 different roads (and probably has about 6 road names?!), but it’s a useful route when crossing from Walmer to Central.
I’m happy with the number after, I just wanted to hear the thought processes behind the decision. And if the thought processes are documented here then future queries can be directed to this thread.
I wish there was some way we could get the devs to fix the data model though. Route numbers should be their own field and not part of the name so that the navigation side can track a specific route through multiple road names. Same problem we have with suburbs. Strange to me that with all the work done so far they neglected to allow for a separate suburb entry…
As for road types, so far all I’ve had to worry about are streets and primary streets. We’ve driven some of the highways, but the tracks aren’t good enough to make into roads yet (I don’t have time to manually place roads) I’m using primary streets for all the major routes in the city (matching google maps). Will be interested to hear what you discussed re highways and freeways.
Yup - agree with you on the data model. If we’re consistent about the “Suburb, City” naming structure that should mean that it will be possible for the Waze team to programmatically populate the Suburb field if it ever arrives and change the city field back to just the city part. Whether we’d ever manage to convince them to devote the dev time needed for such an update in SA is of course another matter.
Road Types
OK, so here’s the road type plan that Blyzz & I debated IRL the other day. I’ll lay out our proposed standards first and then get to the reasoning afterwards.
Freeways: Any national road (with an N prefix) should always be classified as a freeway in Waze, even where it passes through the middle of a one-horse town and has its speed limit reduced to 60kph.
Major Highways: Major arterial roads, as indicated on any maps produced by the Directorate of Surveys & Mapping, or identified as such by SANRAL or the provincial roads department responsible for their upkeep are major highways. These roads have an Rnn naming structure, where nn represents a two digit number (eg: R27), and their road sides enclose their names in a rhombus/diamond shape, and they’re typically the primary roads that connect cities and towns to each other.
Minor Highways: Surveys & Mapping’s maps call these secondary roads. Their designations are R’s followed by three digit numbers. eg: R304, R102.
Primary Streets: In metropolitan areas anything with an M prefix is automatically (at least) a primary street, but there will be of plenty of other major roads that qualify as primary streets without the M prefix. In rural areas, it’s probably appropriate to use primary streets for district roads that have a D prefix, but probably not for private roads (P prefixes).
Promotion: Anything roads from Primary Streets upwards can have segments of their length upgraded to freeway status where appropriate, but only in those segments. You can generally identify genuine freeways by the presence of freeway starts/ends signs at the beginning and end and, most importantly, the absence of intersecting crossroads. ie: Freeway road segments have fly-offs (or ramps) and don’t have stop streets or traffic lights. eg: The M3 in Cape Town is a freeway Westlake to the top of Wynberg Hill and from Newlands Ave all the way to Vredehoek, but the section in between (Edinburgh Dr & Paradise Rd) is just a primary street because it has traffic lights and other intersections with side roads connecting directly to it. See https://world.waze.com/cartouche/?zoom=2&lat=-33.98696&lon=18.45362&layers=BTFT
Demotion: Roads don’t get demoted below the status they inherit from their prefix or naming structure at any point in their length. So, just as the N2 remains a national road (and hence a freeway in Waze classification) where it runs through that intolerable stretch of traffic lights in the Somerset West/Strand area, so the R27 is always a major highway even in the sections where it’s interrupted by lots of traffic lights.
I think the N vs Rnn vs Rnnn vs M breakdown is a pretty clear guideline that should work for us 99% of the time. The biggest question that Blyzz & I debated was what happens to highways when they pass through the centres of towns or cities. In some of the roads I’ve previously labelled, I demoted major highways to primary streets where they pass through towns with traffic lights or just plain old stop streets, but that’s inconsistent with the treatment of national roads, many of which are also subjected to the indignity of stop signs in some areas, and I think inconsistencies are dangerous ground in naming standard! An even bigger motivation for not demoting roads, though, is that lower level roads like primary streets aren’t visible when you zoom out too far on the live map or on our mobile clients, and so if you’re visually scanning a route through a town, highways that get demoted would seem to disappear through the middle of the towns, and that’s never confidence-inspiring.
All comments welcome as usual.
Wish I’d stumbled upon this previously - was wondering why South Africa wasn’t present on the Wiki with naming standards.
I’ll go about renaming all the roads in Grahamstown with abbreviations for Street etc, and also the road name - Rnnn instead of having the Rnnn as an alias soon, as soon as the thing stops giving me blasted error messages.
I’m in a more rural part of South Africa than perhaps zarf & Blyzz, and it doesn’t really make sense to me to make, for example, the N2 a “Freeway” between Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth. Yes, there are certainly sections of the N2 that are what are internationally classed as “Freeways” near and in PE, but in between here and there, even calling it a “Major Highway” is a stretch in international terms! I note your concern about such roads disappearing when you zoom out, but “Major Highway” seems to stay prominent on the Live Map display even when you zoom out pretty far - sure if you can see the whole country on your phone, they disappear, but you’d probably zoom in a bit anyway? On my E71, I can get PE and Grahamstown in one screen and the N2 shows up as a line when designated Major Highway. To me, a Freeway categorically must have ramps as the only way of getting on and off them - if there’s a road that just meets them, or a traffic light or even a stop street, they’re not Freeways!
Whilst there is certainly an argument to be made for adapting the Waze road types to a country, when we’re looking at hosting something like the World Cup with many international visitors (and the big tourism sector in any case), calling a piddly little road a Freeway will probably lead to confusion (You can almost picture it: “I’m on the wrong @#$&*^# road, this thing is too small for a Freeway! Where the heck is the Freeway?” etc.). I’d certainly advocate we keep the major N roads as Major Highways even if they go through towns and have traffic lights, or are just a single lane with no hard shoulder in each direction, promoting them to freeways when they meet the definition?
I like the idea of preferring the “real” name of roads over their numbers in South Africa - we generally don’t refer to or even often signpost very well the M etc numbers of roads. You know you have to go down a particular street to get somewhere, and if you ask for directions, you’ll get street names more often than not. The M etc is quite handy for comparing it to a map book or working out what the big roads might be that get you around quickly.
The other interesting thing in South Africa is road (and town/city) name changes. I like what Durban has done, having the old names below the new ones on signs - you still get a lot of people referencing the old road name in JNB with no sign of that road existing any more if you read the signs and painted road names these days. Perhaps the Alias field would be good for these cases? Having “New Name Rd (Old Name Rd) - M47” would be quite unwieldy. We should definitely think about ways of handling these issues, I think.
I’d also like clarification on another issue. Grahamstown has a lot of very, very wide streets with a central area that isn’t road; I’ve taken to splitting these into 2 one way streets, but am not sure about the best way of getting them to intersect with other narrower two way single roads and with each other. The most “important” roads in Grahamstown are probably High Street, Bathurst Street and Somerset Street, and all of these are (at least in considerable sections) like this. Some of them are even wide enough to have multiple lanes in each direction in places. I’m still tweaking it to get it looking right and actually following where the roads go irl, but you can see what I’m playing with quite easily. Any thoughts? I’ve taken to un-naming short “link” roads where you can cross through “islands” in them.
Here’s a good example: http://world.waze.com/cartouche/?zoom=9&lat=-33.31264&lon=26.52193&layers=BTFTTTFTFFFFFFFFFFTTTT
Of course, the whole area in the box wedged in between the intersection of the 4 lines is actually road - you can drive on it, and you’ll get GPS tracks though there over time.
Welcome Discus
Good to see another person active in the EC.
I was just thinking last week that maybe I should upload what we’ve discussed here onto the wiki. We have more than enough info to make a good start on a page for SA standards.
Choosing when to use Freeway and when to use Major Highway is a tough one. I’m still of the feeling that national roads (Nx) should get denoted as freeway just because they are our major connecting routes and should stand out as thus. But I here what you say about possible confusion. I see that OpenStreetMap has them change to “Trunk” Roads once they stop being true freeways
For my money OpenStreetMap has better road classifications than Waze; being Freeway, Trunk Road, Primary Road, Secondary Road and Unsurfaced Road. (much simpler)
The other deal with Waze is that since it’s beta it’s always changing. I see now that we have “Ramps” as a separate designation. Not sure what’s up with that?
As for joining wide roads. I think that navigation is more important than look. So drive the road with navigation on and see how Waze tells you to go. If what Waze shows makes sense with what you see IRL then that’s perfect.
Thanks pevans_om!
I’ve used “ramps” as on/off ramps on the N2 - you can see examples along the N2 where they’re working on that flyover near Coega (Hougham Park road, if memory serves - I was wondering WTF they were doing having such a minor road randomly crossing the N2 there!), and just outside Grahamstown, where the N2 intersects the R67. I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re intended for.
Yes, the OSM road types seems better from your description. I’m also somewhat wary of Waze’s “Dirt/4x4” classification - there are lots of really good dirt roads in South Africa - and there are 4x4 trails (and/or really bad dirt roads) you’d get stuck on in a “normal car” too - I really feel those two should be split up. I’ve once come across a road that suggested 4x4 only (there was a road sign) - other than some fairly impressive dongas in a few places (which you could have gotten through in a Citi, if you knew what you were doing), it was “just a dirt road” to me. But take a low-slung car along there, and you’d have gotten stuck…
Perhaps we could open a ticket on UserVoice suggesting some changes to road classifications? (my votes are all currently used up on other things already 
)
The POI types could use some work too - there aren’t enough, and there are some really obscure ones when things that make much more sense are absent - what the heck is a “Crew of Vessel Location” when it’s missing Supermarket, Pharmacy (insert common shop type)…? They’ve also spelt “Place of Buisness” wrong.
I think we should definitely decide on what to do with the national highways outside of towns and places they’re not (internationally obviously) freeways before we wiki-ise the suggested road “taxonomy” - does it make sense to call/designate for example the N2 as it winds its way through the former Transkei a “freeway”, what will all the cattle and pedestrians in the road, and the times it simply becomes a major road through a small town?
Perhaps the “easiest” change would be to have the roads designates as “major highways” stick out about as much on the maps as freeways do? This would obviously be something the Waze admins would have to change - we can’t do much about that!
I’ll have to have a look at what it does with navigation turned on - GHT is so small I don’t really use the navigation feature! (And there’s nowhere really convenient to be able to “see” my Nokia in my car whilst I drive along).
It’s great that this system can be more up-to-date that even Google Maps, who did the whole street view thing through here just a few months ago - and there have been road changes since then that don’t reflect. OK, so I don’t have as many roads mapped in GHT as they do, but they’re more “right”
Thanks!
This seem to make sense in urban areas, but large parts of N roads in North West and even the Northern Cape are quite small and often full of potholes.
http://goo.gl/maps/FHTh is an example of a smaller N road.
At parts the N14 between Krugersdorp and Ventersdorp is even closed http://goo.gl/maps/2oA8 due to sinkholes and the detour have a dirt section. (here’s the turn off: http://goo.gl/maps/LB4z, the road itself is not on streetview, the satellite view is here: http://goo.gl/maps/H5Jm )
Hi there,
I see there is now a wiki page for South Africa editing standards:
http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/South_Africa
But this conflicts with some information presented here. For example, the wiki page says " Always write out the suffix in full, i.e. Road instead of rd, Highway instead of Hwy, Avenue instead of Ave. " But this thread says to use abbreviations.
Similarly for primary road numbers. Wiki page says to use the number in brackets “Road Name (M31)”, but the standard on this thread says to use “Road Name - M31”
I did not know about this thread, and have been following the standards set out in the Wiki page.
Is there a consensus about which method to apply? I can go back and rename all my roads again.
Hmm, I think the wiki needs some editing.
Regarding “suffix in full”, this conflicts with the general Waze editing standards, so I don’t think we should go down that road (tee hee); on the other hand, there’s no real need to go back and edit all of your roads just for that.
I would vote for “Joe Slovo Dr (M31)” over “Joe Slovo Dr - M31”; or in the case where you want to write the route number first, I think “R24 (Albertina Sisulu Fwy)” works better than “R24 - Albertina Sisulu Fwy” or “(R24) Albertina Sisulu Fwy”. These are all just workarounds for Waze not presenting alternate road names in a usable fashion, unfortunately.
Just to get back to the suburb issue (a few random thoughts).
I don’t think the priority is going back to streets that are already there - there are too many blank areas that need filling
It is difficult to know where suburb boundaries are. In fact I do not know how you determine the suburb boundaries without very good local knowledge or stealing some copyright info. I have lived in PE for 30 years and there are still some surprises when I see some suburb names boards or in postal addresses that include the suburb
I don’t like the route number first - no-one knows the route number in PE. We go by street names