Hi,
A number of users are reporting seeing Newtown in different areas of NSW. Is this due to Waze’s current limitation of not having a separate state field and hence we are having to name suburbs with the state name next to it? If so, I will need help in locating any Newtown suburbs around Australia to start giving them the state to reduce the geo boundaries. Unless someone can shed light on this?
I’m guessing the main cause is long segments of roads initially labelled Newtown (or another city) but over time users have added new segments that are actually part of other suburbs. The end result is an orphaned section of the long road still has Newtown (or Enmore) but in a different geo boundary.
One of the best add-ons for WME is WME Color Highlights. You can highlight roads that are part of Newtown.
I’ve taken a little look and found that Alice St is labelled incorrectly as “Enmore” and cuts through Newtown.
You can see this in the screenshot attached.
Actually, a user reported issues at around Berowra which is not Newtown. Another somewhere else. This used to be a Windsor issue. I have been using the WME highlight so thanks for the tip anyway.
I have seen newtown around parts of South-East Queensland as well. The weatherzone search says the following newtowns exist:
Newtown, NSW 2042
Newtown, VIC 3220
Newtown, VIC 3351
Newtown, QLD 4305
Newtown, QLD 4350
Ascot is another culprit that I’ve seen around:
Ascot, VIC 3364
Ascot, VIC 3551
Ascot, QLD 4007
Ascot, QLD 4359
Ascot, WA 6104
I fixed up Brighton in Brisbane a few weeks ago with a Qld extension however I’ve not gone back to check it after I installed the WME Colour thingamajig.
Streets with a city of Newtown have been completely removed in Vic about 4 months ago. The Edit map is clean here. However Newtown still shows on the Client. The City layer process is run by the Waze Gods only “occasionally” and for the client view it seems almost never.
That’s a shame as it may put off newcomers who has already questioned wrong suburbs showing indicating inaccurate app. I had same experience when I first used Waze.
It almost makes you want to start a partition for Waze to fix up their city names.
It annoys me when I see the wrong names all over the place. Ascot and Salisbury were invading Oxley on my drive home this afternoon.
Agreed. Same deal, everytime I see a incorrect suburb pop up on my way home, I take note of it, hunt it down on Waze at home and can’t find any incorrect suburb names on roads.
Went for a drive out to Lake Moogerah not so long ago… that also threw up some interesting suburbs on the way. (not to mention complete lack of cellphone signal, so no Paving got done!) 
I have a question in relation to this - I tend to look around when I’m editing, and follow the practice which is current in that area (i.e. - state or no state, fully spelled out roadway designators - Street vs St, Road vs Rd, Crescent vs Cres, etc). I know I read somewhere (the wiki?) that best practice was not to add states when editing the map, but I think I’ve also read somewhere (forum?) that most editors in Aust. are adding states in with suburbs precisely to avoid what this thread is talking about.
Is that what we should be aiming for - i.e. if I find areas which are mapped without a state appended to the suburb, should I go through and edit them so they have the state? I know it’s annoying to find that a street has two hits in the search, one with a state and one without - same street
Hi mikmyn,
The general wiki rule is as long as the Suburb does NOT exist anywhere else/state in Australia, then you don’t need to include the State on the end of the Suburb.
Otherwise include the State abbreviation, so Waze routing doesn’t get confused.
Until they fix the State feature in Waze, this will be an ongoing problem and is the only fix.
Unfortunately some users (including me when I started) didn’t read the Wiki when it came to naming suburbs…
…Thanks ituajr. Been a busy day for me. Started at 3am… 
Thanks ps_au
So, correct me if I’m wrong, but would it not be simpler to just add the state in every case as a standard. It would mean that new editors would see it as the default when they first started editing, and maybe stop them from inadvertently confusing Waze by duplicating cities?
The change in the Waze database City field containing “Suburb, State” to separate fields “Suburb” and “State” is best done (from a programmers point of view) by applying a test to the text in the “Suburb, State” field and checking the last five characters in the field for a comma, a space, and a two or three letter abbreviated State name in capitals, placing this State text into its own field, then truncating the comma and any following characters and placing this Suburb text back into the City field. There is a possibility that the State field will not be stored as text, but as a number corresponding to that state which would save space in the database; if this were done then there would have to be a lookup on the State and an appropriate token stored in the Waze State field.
If you don’t have the State listed in the City (“Suburb”) field, you have to do a lookup on the contents of this City field and match that to a table of Suburbs/States to determine the State in which this Suburb resides, then put this looked-up value into the “State” field.
I’m not convinced that all Newtowns, Newports and similar non-unique suburb names have been eliminated from the database, so the existing corruption of the Waze database is likely to continue if you use the second method of doing a lookup from a table of Suburb and States.
The advantage of using the “Suburb, State” format for the City field right now and until the Waze programmers set up a State field for Australia is that it should be simpler to transition the data over and eliminate the far-flung Newports and Broadwaters that were created in the early days of Waze Australia, but have not been fixed and thus still create problems. If every suburb is of the form “Suburb, State”, then we also know that someone has had to go through and change the older “Suburb” form to the newer one, a process that often discovers bogus suburbs (e.g.“Newport”) inside that Suburb but also finds road segments overlaid by other road segments that should be deleted as they are superfluous. There is a cost of storing four or five extra characters in the database - but people are renaming abbreviated roads to their full names, so I don’t think this will be so much of a problem in comparison :!:. I also have to say that I’ve been using the use of just the suburb name in the City field as well as a nearby “suburb, NSW” label as an indication that this suburb needs more checking for boundaries and bogus suburb names in the Waze Editor. I usually leave suburbs that just have the “suburb, NSW” label alone since it indicates someone has already gone through the suburb making those changes.
I’m in favour of tagging all City fields with the State in the “Suburb, State” form, not just for non-unique suburbs.
Bill
:!: I’m soon to make a posting regarding this issue of road name abbreviations.
IMO use the State name after the Suburb. I know that other Editors say that you should ideally check to see if it exists in another state, but until the States feature is re-enabled for Australia on the World server, I think it’s a safer way to ensure Suburbs don’t double up.
I believe the Waze Administrators can do edit out of the States in the Suburbs field (like a Find/Replace function), but would have to double-check my sources on this.
I looked at the linked page and may be misunderstanding, but in this case, we were trying to decide whether to recommend editors explicitly allocate a State to a street/landmark, instead of implicitly allowing the State to be set for a map object based on some unknown set of criteria by Waze.
In the case where the Suburb name is unique, there shouldn’t be any issue since the allocation of the Suburb name obviously determines the State regardless of whether this is explicitly set in the City field. If someone has incorrectly set the Suburb, (a common problem), then this usually needs to be fixed manually since the boundary lines between suburbs (and hence states) are often not condusive to simple checking the object GPS co-ordinates against a set of mathematical regions that represent the Suburb boundaries.
The only time that a check of a street/landmark’s GPS co-ordinates would be useful would be where, early in the Waze editing process in Australia, streets/landmarks were allocated non-unique suburb names or just plain wrong suburb names. A suburb hundreds of kilometres away from the ‘average’ location of the suburb is likely to be incorrect, although I guess it is possible that same-named suburbs might be closer across state borders.
I have just been given some authoritative information that says that Waze is not concerned with our format choice of “Suburb” or “Suburb, State”. They will, at some point in the future, deal with the existing combination of “Suburb” and “Suburb, State” formats of the City field, and we (Australian editors) don’t need to do anything to make their job easier and whichever City field format decision we go with won’t make it harder for them.
So the decision we make should be made on the aesthetics and ease of editing for us. I suspect that us resolving the multi-state suburb problem might make Waze’s job slightly easier in implementing the transition to a separate State field; the City layer in the WME editor can be consulted to see if there are those lengthy coloured suburb regions originate or terminate in our own editable areas. If we can’t edit the segments because they are outside our editable area, we need to pass them on to an appropriate Area Manager or Country Manager. I often just turn off all layers in WME except for the City layer, zoom way out and look for small or oddly shaped coloured regions that indicate where there might be a suburb naming problem, then zoom back in and turn on the Roads layer to see why the region’s City fields are unusual.