DE editors,
The standard for the naming of US Routes was changed to: US-xx (from US Hwy xx)
in January 2012 in order to save precious map real estate and to shorten TTS delivery time.
US Highways should:
be named according to the US-xx convention,
include directional indicators (i.e., “US-40 E”) for all split portions of the route,
include local names where appropriate (i.e., when signed primarily using the local name; when * home/business addresses are given using a local name)
be navigationally sound, including all intersections and turnarounds, and
have, when access is partially- or fully-limited, properly-named ramps according to signage.
For example
INTERSTATE:
I-95 N
I-495 S
US HIGHWAYS: Try to keep local names as primary (e.g. Pulaski Hwy) and put below as alternate name.
US-40 W (Split “1-way” segments)
US-13 (Unsplit “2-way” segments)
STATE ROUTES: Try to keep local names as primary (e.g. S College Ave) and put below as alternate name. (more info)
SR-1 S (Split “1-way” segments)
SR-896 (Unsplit “2-way” segments)
ONRAMP:
to I-95 N / Wilmington / Philadelphia
to I-495 S / Newport / Baltimore
OFFRAMP:
numbered exit: Exit 114: South Smyrna
numbered exit with multiple names: Exit 165B: I-95 N / Wilmington / Philadelphia
numbered exit with multiple exits: Exit 4A-B: SR-1 / SR-7 / SR-58 / Mall Rd / Dover / Churchmans Crossing
non-numbered exit: Exit to SR-1 S / Dover
Caution!
You need to have Level 5 to be able to change most of these highway names
Finish what you started–don’t leave things done halfway!
Any questions please contact me (mishterhaz) or our Regional Manager: Jondrush *shamelessly copied from orbitc’s post in the NJ forum. Thank you for the awesome work!
Couple of minor comments:
Under US Highways, I would use “Pulaski Hwy” as the example for completeness.
Under Offramp, in the third example you use “SR” examples, seems that these should be “DE” for consistency.
I probably should have chimed in on the NJ version, but I don’t understand the admonishment to “NEVER stop halfway.”
As for “never stop halfway” – I left that in there because I believe in part to just reinforce the fact that you should try to complete entire areas at a time, and definitely NOT skip around.
No objections, but I would never have come up with that on my own. This is not a big deal at all. But my thoughts are that naming the roads is not like making all the connections on an interchange. Waze is still going to work if a road name changes format. Read completely literally, it would mean that I should never make a name change to I-95 because I’m not going to check the road from end-to-end to make sure that I-95 is completely named that way. However, I think most people won’t get hung up on this and will understand that they should merely complete each task that they start as each edit they make will go live with the periodic tile builds.
So would I, but officially all state routes in Delaware are referred to as “Delaware Route XXX”. Much like in Louisiana, where everything is LA-XXX. Many other states refer to their routes the same way, Kansas, Michigan, etc. The hope is that eventually Waze will recognize this and the TTS will say “Delaware One” or “Delaware Route One”.
Well, no offense, but who cares what they are officially called? We are giving directions to drivers, not providing testimony in court. I’d rather know what drivers call the road than what the DOT calls it.
I agree, the best solution would be if the software devs would allow us to decouple the text on the map from the spoken text, but so far that ability does not exist.
I can agree with you on the point of “we are giving directions to drivers, not providing testimony in court.” But, my impression at least, is that there is a push in the Waze community to name state and country roads according to how they are locally designated. So in Michigan (for example, since I was driving around there this weekend for a wedding), their state roads are “Michigan XXX”, and Waze was signed as “M-XXX”. Odd, not necessarily the nicest thing, but it matched the signs and the terminology in the area.
That would definitely be nice. Maybe I’m delusional, but I could have sworn I saw a phonetic input at one point, but it was removed. Either way, such an improvement would be great to allow for better pronunciation of road names (like Pulaski Hwy…) but who knows when and how it would be implemented.
Based on some new information from DELDOT, it looks like “State Route” is going to be more accepted. Some of their official maps are now listing “State Route 1” or “State Route 7”. Most construction signs are now referring to the routes as “SR-1 N” for example. I changed only a few sections of SR-1 to DE-1 as a trial. The TTS is a bit wonky, saying “Dee Eee 1” – and frankly if the DOT is now going to start showing construction signs as SR-1, we may as well adhere to that standard, given that the majority of the country does that too.
Yeah when I started reading this stuff on the DOT pages, I just about threw my hands up and said “I GIVE UP!” haha…but from now on, it’s definitely going to stay as State Route. I don’t care. :lol:
I’m not very familiar with route numbering and naming in Delaware, so in the edits I’ve done, I’ve avoided major changes to the names of numbered routes except to make them consistent and make the “select entire street” button useful. I’ve encountered cases like this, where the primary name was “Rd 396” and the alternate name was “Line Rd”, and also route numbers formatted like “17Y-123” around Fenwick Island and Bethany Beach. I’m guessing these are county numbers, but I have no idea where to verify this since I’m really only familiar with Maryland and Florida. I’ve retained the number as an alternate name and set the primary name as the road’s actual name, since this seems to follow the guidelines and has addressed many update requests. Let me know if this is incorrect.
I just use the name posted on the road signs, which in that case is “Line Rd”; the county route numbers are rarely (if ever) used in practice. I don’t usually keep them as alternate names, although I can’t see any harm in doing so.
Sounds good. I wanted to leave the option to delete that information to someone who is more familiar with the use of those route numbers. Another item is Coastal Highway (Route 1) in Bethany and Fenwick. I encountered “SR-1 / Coastal Hwy”, “State Rte 1”, “State Hwy 1”, and “Coastal Hwy”, occasionally with north/south labels, so I just set the primary name to what the majority of the segments were already named (SR-1 N/S / Coastal Hwy) for the sake of consistency, and added “State Hwy 1” as the alternate name, though it looks like “Coastal Hwy” is the correct primary name. Unfortunately this is outside of my driving area now but it will be much easier to fix.
The major highways in “Lower, Slower Delaware”, namely DE 1, US 13, and US 113, are all primarily marked with their route numbers in Waze, not their names. This may be problematic if/when Waze starts using its internal database for searches, because there are residential and business addresses on these roads that use the names, not the highway numbers. On the other hand, using the numbers seems to be easier for out-of-town drivers to cope with. There’s no good answer to this one, but since Waze isn’t using the names for search results yet, I’ve generally left the numbers alone on the major highways (but not the minor highways, which were much less consistent to start with).