That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard about that. I think that’s a good idea. Anyone know what the lifespan of a street sign is? Is there an official max lifespan, or is it just until the sign isn’t too beat up or damaged to see anymore? I’m just wondering if it could be 10-20 years before all signs are changed. It will be odd to see some signs with all caps and some with mixed case.
I imagine most municipalities will simply wait a certain time until all the signs probably need to be replaced anyway. Although I suppose that doesn’t account for signs that are run over, stolen, etc.
When I was growing up the road signs for the locally maintained roads were simply 4x4s driven into the ground with the street name letters carved in the wood and painted white. I don’t think the municipality gave a thought about state or federal standards. I’ll have to look and see what’s there now the next time I visit my parents.
Tangentially related to upper/mixed case, some of you may have also noticed the new standards for fonts used on certain specific signs as well:
http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/clearviewdesignfaqs/index.htm
(Link has lots of examples where DOTs have goofed and used the wrong fonts for an application.)
I noticed in New Orleans that the “De” is capitalized as in “De Saix” on street signs. But in Waze it is “DeSaix” (without the space).
Ah, yeah. I left it because the sign at the intersection with Gentilly/St Bernard doesn’t have the space. I saw the sign at Wisner did and decided to follow the sign at St Bernard since it’s bigger. Upon further investigation, though, I see that it’s spaced on most of the other signs I see, including the green overhead sign at the Gentilly split. I’ve changed it now.
I saw “LaPlace” on a sign. It is good not to have a space. “La” is widely used as an abbreviation. For example, SR-78 is called “La 78”. There are Lafayette and Lajuene and many other names which are written as a name, not as French words. If you don’t put a space in the name, that is fine with me.
I’ve just been going off the signs. There’s also “La Salle St”; it pronounces that no problem. Highways like “LA-78” have a capital A and that makes it pronounce the letters.
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In American English street names are proper nouns (specifically proper names) and the general rule for proper names in English is to capitalize them. Using a non-English word as a street identifier makes the name a proper name regardless of the translation. All street names for roads in the US should have first letter capitalized.
Not necessarily - when the street is named after a person and that’s person name starts with a lowercase letter - like “deKoven”, the street name matches the person’s name.
Okay, Andy, could you cite examples from several US cities where that convention is followed? That’s what I am asking.
(Even so, how does this apply to streets which are not named for a person?)
As far as this goes, it wouldn’t necessarily matter. If any streets are legally/officially written using a lowercase letter at the beginning, then we can’t make any broad statement that all streets need to start with a capital letter. It comes back to what I said earlier… if the official street name starts with a lowercase letter, it should be written as such in the app. Even if 99% of streets don’t start with a lowercase letter, any that do should be written in the same way they are written officially. Maps of any sort should always match the official version of any names they include (or one of the official versions, it there are multiple names). The only exception that I can think of to that is if the map uses all caps instead of mixed case and I certainly don’t suggest we do that because all caps looks really bad.
Street names are proper nouns, which, in English should start with a capital letter. Also, US DOT is now requiring that replaced signs have correct title case names. That being said, however, if an official street name somewhere starts with a lowercase letter, we should be able to reflect that. We should, however, also remember that official names and names on actual signs can often diverge, especially in places where the name of something may have changed and the local sign authority uses a more conservative approach to replacing signs.
Okay, I’ll just assume for a moment that all that is true, though I have no actual example of an official name starting with a lowercase letter in any city in the USA. I thank all who have given a viewpoint on the possibility of using lowercase.
In my original post, I cited some specific streets in a specific city.
Does someone need to ask the latest editor of these streets to justify starting the names with lowercase beyond his preference? The naming looks inconsistent to me. Segments of the same street have variations, perhaps sometimes caused by different editors following different conventions for capitalization.
How would you resolve this? (I sincerely doubt that there is an official source to back up the name not starting with a capital letter, certainly not on the street signs. But I don’t want to offend any cultural sensitivity of editors. Is the burden on the person who wants to capitalize to prove that capitalization is the official way?)
Here is your example.
I posted about this way back when auto-capitalization was introduced: https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22365&start=40#p203852
There is a Streetview in that post and here is a newer street view image of the same spot: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=dekoven+dr+middletown,+ct&hl=en&ll=41.560824,-72.646396&spn=0.000572,0.001742&gl=us&hnear=deKoven+Dr,+Middletown,+Connecticut+06457&t=h&layer=c&cbll=41.560824,-72.646396&panoid=BksPnMLkcx5eBPkAEpjURQ&cbp=11,150.78,0,-7.14&z=20
Personally, and this is just me and not meant as a standard for everyone to follow, if I wasn’t sure whether or not it was officially capitalized, I would check with the editor(s) of that road and see if they capitalized it in that way because that was the official way or if they just guessed. I’d probably also do some Google searches for the street in question and see if I can find examples of capitalization. For example, the deKoven Drive mentioned above can be searched in Google and if you avoid looking at the various map sites and look at more official sites, you come across this city website that lists the City Hall address as being on deKoven Drive (see the address at the bottom of the page). I’m sure that if the City Hall address on the city’s website capitalizes it in that way, then it’s probably correct… even if you didn’t have the nice Big Green Sign shown in the street view to go by.
Yes, this means some research, but I would rather have Waze be correct than to just blindly capitalize everything. Do other maps capitalize it as Dekoven? Yes. Should we? No.
Did this thread reach a consensus? I would agree with the two comments above, certainly if no official evidence to the contrary is available.
My “poster child” for this is El Camino Real, the historic road from San Francisco to the southern tip of Baja California that connected the missions. I have lived near Californian sections of El Camino Real for decades, and I never saw a lower-case e until I started using Waze. Every time I see “el Camino Real” on the maps my brain shouts “wrong!” even though I myself write the translation “the King’s Highway” without the slightest sense of cognitive dissonance. Everybody I know treats the “El” as part of a proper noun.
As I’ve edited parts of Santa Barbara I’ve been changing a few leading (and I emphasize leading) “el”, “la” and “via” to “El”, “La” and “Via” simply because as a Californian observing Californian street names, I see leading lower case as incorrect. If it is official policy that we use mother-tongue rules and not local practice then I had better stop doing that! But consensus appears to be that, within the US, mother-tongue rules take a distant back seat to English and local practice.
I did not see any consensus so far. Nowhere in California have I ever seen a sign with a street name or place name that started with a lowercase letter. Many signs are in mixed case. Every one of them capitalizes “El” and “La”. Failure to do so leads to silly looking names which appear to mix English and Spanish, like “Upper la Riviera”, “el Dorado Heights”, or “Greater del Paso”. Street signs are in English. If they weren’t, we would have to translate them “Royal Road Road” or whatever.
Just follow the signs. If the sign’s in all caps, capitalize the first letter. If some place has signs that say “el Camino Azul” or “de Ridder Blvd”, then do it like that.
There may well be no examples of this in the states. But there’s no reason not to follow it where it does.
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The issue is that in CA there are no examples. But editors make the first letter lowercase anyway.
The problem is that they don’t follow the sign where it does capitalize the first letter.