Thanks for all of the comments and discussion.
The app autocomplete is still a bit of a mystery, but the use of neighborhood appears to work well enough. If you explicitly search for an address in Jamaica Plain, you get the right location. (Though the app still doesn’t show “Jamaica Plain” in the address when you tap on the search result - it’s labeled “Boston”. Oh well.)
With that and the discussion in mind, here’s the revised proposal:
The current MA standard for city/town names on street segments is to use one of the 351 official names as primary for streets. While this works well in most cases, there are situations (notably Boston’s neighborhoods and the Cape’s villages) where strict adherence to this rule can cause routing problems, and we have deviated from the rule in the past (particularly on the Cape).
To address this issue, the following change is proposed for street segments only (does not apply to Places):
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Use official name as primary, unless:
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There is a well-established village/neighborhood/CDP name, that is more commonly used (and has been cleared with SMs and listed in the MA wazeo as accepted). This can be used as the primary, with official name as alternate. Use USPS Zip Code boundaries to determine the extent of neighborhoods/villages. (The WME US Government Boundaries script is useful for this purpose.)
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There is duplication in street name / address between villages (e.g. Harwichport/West Harwich) or a neighborhood vs. city (think Dorchester/Boston), leading to routing issues which could be solved by using village/neighborhood name as primary. Again, clearance by SM required.
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Any other oddball cases. Discussion, agreement, and publishing on the MA wazeo required.
We won’t start a program of re-labeling streets, but will update segments as needed to solve routing issues. It’s probably preferable to do the entire extent of a named street, rather than an individual segment, though. Some consideration needs to be given to avoiding islands in the city layer as well.
mudge42