Following on from this thread where the routing was possibly affected by some incorrect cities on the A1, I’m moving the discussion over here so that it can be debated openly.
The main argument for puting major roads in cities is for clear traffic reports.
However, without cities defined on roads, Waze still include the name of the nearest town or suburb in the report.
Even more usefully, it will report alerts between two towns if the road isn’t in one.
What does everyone else think? Does it even matter?
I personally think that routing comes first over reporting , i`d rather a hazard etc report was off than the routing saying something when i should be going the opposite , just my opinion , obviously if the city name effects routing it needs to be fixed more than if it affects reporting !
probably need clarification from Waze about this. I’d be loathed to city name the grid in MK for example because they are city boundaries and to get into each ‘city’ you have to use an access road.
Routing through seems to work fine with no city names.
If a major road has frontages then it should have a city name I believe though.
If a road is between two town then obviously it is in neither and as such will have no City applied.
Soon as you get to the town, city, village though the section that IS in that town/ city, village, should have that applied to it.
Motorways are different as they do not interact with the rest of the streets of an area bar via junctions.
Silly thing, but I though ACCURACY was key here?
If we had a program that was designed around the UK system then we wouldn’t need to be popping (Notts) or (Nottingham) or (Staffs) after suburbs and such bar those rare examples where two towns of the same name exist in one county.
So accuracy - major roads should have the local “City” tag completed. And when not in any town have no “City” info. Hell, ALL roads should have this.
Hmm…I think routing should take importance here. I leave all major roads as no city unless the entire segment is within the boundaries. The “city” boundaries can easily be defined purely from the residential roads and will give Waze correct city naming for any non defined roads in traffic reports.
Ok, guys, you’d expect me to bring up London so I might as well. I see a lot of majors labelled with London as the city (heck, I’ve even done it myself) rather than the local area. Do you think we should just leave all London majors blank for city or use London or the local area? I presume this is also an issue for other large urban areas. What happens to majors in Birmingham?
Remember it’s not just about the routing bug but also it affects traffic reports as described above. I personally like the ones that say “between …” or “in the neighborhood [sic] of …”.
I feel that for major A-roads that go through (or around) a major city, then the traffic reports are more useful if they reference the nearest suburb rather than the city itself. So, for simplicity, setting the entire major road to be in no city and assigning suburbs to the ordinary streets.
For example, the A6120 is the Outer Ring road for Leeds, and is about 15 miles long. Having a traffic alert say “Traffic on A6120 in Leeds” is not very useful. In the past I attempt to mitigate this problem by adding extra information to the road name:
I’m now working on reducing the megalopolis of Leeds and replacing it with smaller towns that make up the city. This should result in more useful traffic reports, like on the Dartford Crossing today. Having the alert say “From Aveley to Stone” has the implicit advantage of including the direction, which is particularly useful on single carriageways.
Thanks Tim. If I ever want to lose the will to live I’d do the same to London!
Just wondering if we will ever get the ability to set the city name according to a set polygon but excluding certain categories of road. That would make life a lot easier!
I am for most of it but, for some areas, i follow (from the wiki):
e.g. So as the A13 passes through Barking, I have named the segments Barking (Essex). As a rule of thumb I am using anything inside the A406 as “Suburb (London)”., and outside “Town (County)”
