There is a lack of a standard for labeling cities in Delaware. I’d like to propose a specification for that for the state wiki. This will not be easy of course.
The current situation is not pretty. We have some extreme situations including “cities” named “Dover Base Housing” or “Brookside” which is a housing development near Newark.
Much of the rural part of the state has no cities defined on their road segments.
Why is it important? Well Waze is primarily a navigation app, so we should focus on matters that affect navigation. Next would be the end user experience. In the current app the city layer doesn’t really display on the app but the city name is display centered over the area – sort of floats over it. However, more important, it can be critical in finding the correct location to route people to. It is used in address matching. If the city field is missing, it can fail back to Google results – which may be wrong.
So what are our options? Here are three possibilities using the example of Pike Creek which is labeled as a city in Waze, is unincorporated, but is a census designated place:
Map everything to a postal zip code boundary. Basically if your address says you are in Newark, DE, that’s what the city layer says. This will help searching for addressing but suddenly that same Pike Creek area is cut in half, so Pike Creek goes away and half of it goes to Newark, half of it goes to Wilmington.
So… no easy answers. We should probably look at what other states do. I am familiar with Virginia. In urban areas they use CDPs, in rural areas they only map incorporated areas and leave other areas with no cities. The latter has created some search issues and URs that I am very familiar with as people in the sticks have searched for home addresses and (in some cases) fallen back to bad Google pin results and I’ve had to get the pins adjusted in Google to get it working right for them. The only other way around it for them is to have them type in their address as “123 Elm Street, VA” (ie, without a city)
I vote we follow what NJ does. It has worked well; however, NJ does not have unincorporated areas (such as Bear, DE). That said, I believe it should be in the order of: unincorporated area, then CDP.
“Every segment of every road type should have a City Name in the Primary Field. When naming a segment use the incorporated name or the CDP (Census Designated Place) name when the place is locally known and/or more commonly recognized by that name.”
I think we should use the names that people use when giving their address to visitors, customers, etc. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, that is their postal address. (Yes, I know Virginia doesn’t do it that way, but IMHO, that is a mistake.)
If a segment/place is inside an incorporated city or town, then that should take priority (but in most cases the post office address will be the city/town name anyway).
ZIP code boundaries may be difficult to determine in some cases, but they are available from multiple sources, and since they are assigned by the U.S. government, the information is ultimately in the public domain.
I think we should focus on what improves the primary focus on the app, and that is navigation. And step one in navigation is finding the correct location to navigate to.
I have a concrete example of some poor guy I’ve been working for weeks near Rileyville Virginia that I just can’t get it so he can give people his address in Waze to route to his house because he’s in an unincorporated area. He has a correct house number on his road segment. He put a residential “place” thing correctly that I approved with his street address on it and photo. But nothing works because Waze will by default auto-complete the address as Rileyville postal address and use an incorrect Google result and all attempts I’ve made to get it corrected in Google mapmaker so far have not been successful because there are multiple mapmaker issues out there. The only way it works is if someone types his address in exactly as “637 xxxxx Ave, VA” (they have to explicitly omit the city to force Waze not to auto-complete a city in it, which is silly to expect a user to remember to do)
(I can PM his details if interested)
So since there are downsides to NOT having a city field defined, I assume there are similar negative impacts that could happen from not having the postal city name in there. Do these same Google fall backs happen if a different name is in the city field? e.g., Pike Creek is in the field instead of Newark or Wilmington?
I think I will break my Dad’s house number in Pike Creek in Waze as a test and see if searches for it will failover to Google’s correct results. (sort of like the opposite scenario of the above)
As a followup to my own post… Am I trying to use cities to force a fix for a fundamentally busted system that needs to be fixed at a different level in Waze? Witness:
I too vote for zip codes I think it will cover ALL areas of Delaware vs only using the incorporated places, cities, towns, villages, CDP’s, and even unincorporated areas/communities. But I still think we can use those layers, we just need a way of turning them on and off…so we don’t have too many overlapping layers. That is the goal right? To correctly map cities but also correctly find address. I found these helpful resources too:
I’m not sure using ZIP codes would be the most prudent. Using the local name (generally the unincorporated name, like Bear or Glasgow) is what people most commonly know a given area to be.
My understanding was that the cities layer was really for informational purposes, but had nothign to do with actual address searching as that is handled through Google. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here.
My in-laws live in an unincorporated area of Sussex County but their zip code address is Lewes, DE. When I search their address, it defaults to Lewes, DE in Waze search even though their street has no city name in it. When I leave the city blank (123 Main St, DE), I don’t get their address as a search result at all. That makes me wonder how much the city layer actually matters in the search function?
Greets. Would like to resurrect, resolve, and document this in the Delaware wiki page.
I’ve reviewed the wiki pages for all 50 states. The vast majority don’t have anything besides the standard state template language. New Jersey is the only state that says every segment should have a city name. New Jersey also has no unincorporated areas. Some states, like Kentucky, only map incorporated towns. Some others used Census Designated Places (CDP)
No state is using zip codes to designate the city name.
There used to be a problem searching for addresses without a city name but I’m not seeing that now. I tested removing the city name from a street and purposely forced a house number on that street to a wrong location (my parent’s house in Pike Creek … I know they don’t use Waze). When I search for this address, it shows it as in Wilmington (I assume from Google) but the search result shows the incorrect location (so I know the pin is coming from Waze, not Google). Other houses on that street are correct (they are unbumped so don’t know if coming from Google or Waze)
Whatever is chosen, it should be something where any street at any location in the state can be verified from a public source as to what it should be so there’s no guesswork.
I propose the following standard, in priority order:
Special cases that are discussed in this forum, approved, then documented in the wiki as an exception, if it can be determined the boundaries of said special case.
If none of the above, set city name to none
Also, freeways set to none. Some other states do this (MD and PA). I mainly like it for maintainability. Segmenting a freeway just to change the city name seems a bit silly. However, the BDP (big detour penalty) reason for not putting a city name on a freeway doesn’t apply now due to recent changes to that policy (it ignores cities) so it’s not as big of a deal as it used to be.
There’s another component to this that I forgot. Public places (business listings). For that I propose the city field should be the postal city as part of the businesses address. I’ve done some testing and it does not effect the city layer in WME.
The city field in WME for segments seems to be primarily for:
Showing the name of the city in the app, centered in the area usually. On some color schemes it will also color the city layer a little different so you can see boundaries.
On advanced road reports while driving. Those things that pop up when you’re sitting at a red light. Like “accident reported on I-95 near Newark”
Amazingly, it does NOT appear to affect searching that much. As stated before, my parents live in Pike Creek but postal address is Wilmington. I moved their address pin to a wrong location to test to ensure Waze is reporting its own results. I tried with no city on the street, and with Pike Creek on the street. In both cases, it shows in search results as Wilmington (I assume getting that from Google) but the returned result is the Waze location. Also if you pull down to see more of the search result, THEN it says Pike Creek.
So the next step in this process (if no one else has any concerns) is to make sure our other SM (mreiser) is OK with it, and then run it past our RC (orbitc), then I codify it in the state wiki page.
Then we can start fixing really bad cases of out-of-place city layers that are causing “tearing” in the app, and as time permits just correct other segments.
I’ve created a Google Map of the CDPs of Delaware. It shows most of the state would be “no city” With a few exceptions it lines up with what people commonly refer to as the areas… If you browse the map it will give you a good idea what is being proposed.
I can see a few areas that might cause people some concern. Brookside is a CDP, but in real life it’s a housing development. The Brookside CDP is larger than the development. So someone in Todd Estates might whine if their search for their house shows it is in Brookside.
Of course this map can be edited and we could change it for exceptions or add new areas with consensus. My main concern in all of this is there’s a definitive reference so no editor has to guess.
Thinking this could even be used to create a map overlay for Waze similar to the raid overlays to make it easier to define.
I’ll add my 2 cents here - Delaware has been putting up “neighborhood” type signs in subdivisions outside of the cities.
Some people may refer to these names, most have one or two entrance roads off main roads.
A good example is Heritage Shores just south of Bridgeville west of US13.
Not sure how you deal with these, people we know tend to use them when giving directions. FWIW, I don’t have an answer for this and maybe the street names are sufficient to navigate, but I’m surprised we don’t see more error reports on sub-division names.
Thanks for the feedback. I don’t know of any state that puts neighborhoods in to the city field. CDP is about as granular as they get. As noted above though, Delaware does have a neighborhood that is also a CDP – Brookside.
Oh wow, I see I didn’t put a link to my Google Map showing the CDPs
As feared, I have a UR from someone in Todd Estates is upset that he is being shown to be in Brookside. So now I’m thinking, since there aren’t that many CDPs that are not also incorporated areas, just to scale this back to be incorporated areas only – if not, set city name to no name.
Also, having a “city” named “Dover AFB Housing” (which is a CDP) is a little silly.
