If I understand the WIKI correct, we only enter City/Town names? So we enter Birmingham, or Solihull, as opposed to Kings Heath, or Shirley. Is that right?
Thanks
Simon
Yes, it’s generally best to stick to the major metropolis names. Edit: However, for a large metropolis it can often be advantageous to break it up into smaller areas.
More importantly, it’s best to use city/town names that are unique, as Waze can ‘smudge’ together two places with the same name. For example, there’s a Black Heath near Birmingham, and another in London.
For smaller towns and villages, it is common practice to append the county name on the end to ensure uniqueness. If you really want to name the major suburbs of a large city, you can use the same technique. See How To Label Cities for a more detailed guide.
Also see this long thread for a discussion on how to deal with suburbs in Nottingham.
For big cities like Birmingham, you’ll want to be naming using districts and suburbs.
So for example, you’d have “Kings Heath (Birmingham)”.
As for Shirley, I’m not sure whether it would be listed as “Shirley (Birmingham)”, “Shirley (Solihull)” or just “Shirley (W Mids)”. The last one is in keeping with how Google Maps lists it.
I’m going to reiterate the importance of the appended ()'s, as Shirley is a good example of when they are needed, due to their being another Shirley in Derbyshire. Smudge/city creep is the enemy and must be destroyed at all costs :DDDDDD
So should I be using, for example, Tattenhoe (Milton Keynes) rather than Tattenhoe?
Given that most districts in MK are around a square mile tops using the () would make a lot of (Milton Keynes) appear on the map and it would look not very nice I imagine.
Thankfully the district called Milton Keynes Village is not on maps now as Milton Keynes Village (Milton Keynes) is a bit of a mouthful
Sent from my X10i using Tapatalk
I guess the decision on whether to do districts gets harder as the city/town gets smaller. I would be tempted to use them for Milton Keynes myself, but maybe try “Tattenhoe (MK)”, as I think that would be acceptable. Maybe wait for some more input from the others?
Also a thing to bear in mind with crowding of the map, not all town names will appear at all levels. Generally speaking the smaller a town, the closer in you’d need to be zoomed in order for it to show up, so with MK having smaller districts, you might not be able to see them on the map until you’re zoomed in enough for overcrowding not to matter anyway. I guess it might be a matter of trialling it to see if it looks crap or okay.
For the (small) city of York, I haven’t named any of the suburbs inside the outer ring road. Only the villages outside if the ring road have been named with (York) as the suffix, even though they’d probably be unique without them anyway.
Leeds is a sprawling metropolis that does have different areas, and has “, Leeds” as the suffix (not my doing). Both these examples benefit from short names.
Is “MK” a locally recognised abbreviation? That might help with the clutter…
Definitely. The centre:MK is the name of the large shopping centre and the football team is referred to as the MK Dons
Sent from my X10i using Tapatalk
The naming of suburbs are vital for traffic reports, especially when there are long roads that go right through or around a large city. It’s not helpful to see a report like “Heavy traffic on M25 near London”…
via TapaTalk