Somewhat related question: How often are the city polygons redrawn anyway? In mid-August, manoeuvre and I re-named all the segments on the University of British Columbia campus from a city name of “UBC” to “Vancouver”. But over a month later, I am still seeing UBC city label over the campus, and the “Vancouver” polygon does not yet extend over the UBC campus.
Thanks for the note. I’ve changed them back.
UBC is not part of Vancouver, it is its own municipality. I did some research on this a while back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Endowment_Lands has some details.
If you’d like, we can make the UEL parks “no city”, and just the UBC Campus to “UBC”, but it is DEFINITELY NOT Vancouver.
Technically, everything west of Westbrook Mall is UBC, everything between Westbrook and the Pacific Spirit Regional Park is “University Endowment Lands Residential Community” and then the PSRP is part of the University Endowment Lands.
I think we’re better off calling the whole thing “UBC”, but that’s just me.
I have to agree with DoctorKB, UBC is considered its own municipality, they have their own bylaws, building codes etc. You can find a map of the full area here:
http://www.universityendowmentlands.gov.bc.ca/library/Official_Community_Plan.pdf
There are some streets that are part of UBC that are currently shown as Vancouver. I’ve corrected the ones I can, but need some unlocks to update one which I’ve submitted to the forum.
Kayos
docKB, Kayos: While you are technically correct that UBC and the UEL are not strictly speaking part of the city of Vancouver, I disagree with your conclusion that “UBC” should be listed as the city name.
UBC is not its own municipality. It’s an unincorporated area that is part of Metro Vancouver. More technically and legally speaking both UBC and the UEL are part of Greater Vancouver Electoral Area A. source. They are, from a governance level, administered by the province i.e. they have no mayors or councillors. They are definitely oddities from a legal/administrative point of view. While I think we can probably all agree we shouldn’t name the streets here with the city name of “Greater Vancouver Electoral Area A” :lol: , I think one can make a strong argument that you likewise should not use UBC or UEL (or their full expanded names either) and that “Vancouver” remains the most logical and appropriate choice:
The Waze map’s primary purpose is functional navigation; it’s not a cadastral archive. The distinction between the UEL, UBC, and Vancouver is important from the point of view of land tenure, municipal government and representation, etc., but it has no significance from the point of view of navigating in ones car. Just like we argue that the Waze map should be a simplified logical representation of street segments rather than literal reproductions, I think the same is true for the more abstracted metadata like city names. In a case like this, common usage should preside. Form should follow function, not the other way around. And the evidence abounds that almost nobody in Vancouver considers either the UEL or UBC itself to be anything but within the city of Vancouver from a practical everyday point of view.
Significant data points:
UBC itself lists its own street address as being within the city of Vancouver:
http://www.ubc.ca/about/contact.html
Canada Post uses city of Vancouver for all postal addresses in both the UEL and at UBC.
Businesses in the area use Vancouver for their street addresses. Example, a CIBC branch technically in the UEL:
Important places for navigation like the UBC hospital use Vancouver as their address:
http://www.vch.ca/locations-and-services/find-locations/?site_id=239
In actual usage I find no examples where “UBC” is used as a physical address. I suspect you’d find that the vast majority of people who live on the UEL have never considered giving their address out as such.
I think common usage here is that Vancouver is used overwhelmingly for addresses in both UBC and the UEL, and I think Waze should follow that convention. By using UBC as city name, we risk introducing inconsistencies with Waze Places for many places within these areas, and I think that’s bad. Using “Vancouver” as city name would confuse precisely nobody, and would be in line with the vast majority of navigable addresses already in common usage both at the university and around it.
manoeuvre was in agreement with me before we made the switch originally, so it’s clear that there is at least some level of lack of agreement on this issue at the CM level.
In any case, I take it from the fact that you immediately switched this back to UBC that this is not a matter up for debate? As a Waze editor, I can live with your decision if that’s what it is. But as a Vancouverite who lives right by UBC and knows the UEL very well indeed, I respectfully disagree that this is the right decision for making the Waze map as navigable as possible.
Cheers,
Dave
You raise some good points and would be along the same lines that we don’t identify cities withing municipalities such as Guildford or Cloverdale in Surrey. However, and on the flip side, I have navigated to destinations within UBC with no city issues and I’m not aware of any URs in the area complaining that the locations are within Vancouver, not UBC.
Kayos
I could always submit some! :lol: I agree there are no URs complaining about this. But when you do a search for something at UBC from the Waze app, notice all the other tabs - Google Pins, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google search, all of them show Vancouver as the city result for searches. Waze is literally the only one that doesn’t. And given that we know that Waze priortizes Google Pins over Waze Places, searches for UBC are most likely going to yield Google Pins… which point to Vancouver.
At the end of the day, if the Waze map identifies these areas as “UBC”, we will literally be the only organization that does so. Yellow Pages, White Pages, Canada Post, the university itself, even the UEL’s own websites 1, 2 use Vancouver as their listed city!
No other university in the country, as far as I can see, uses its university name as a city (I checked U of A, Queens, U of T, McGill, Dalhousie), so there is no precedent in that regard; the only argument for using UBC is relying on the legal status of this land, but I’ve already stated that I don’t think this is relevant for a navigation app if nobody actually uses the legal title in common everyday life.
Given that there is not a single example of a business, UBC building, student organization, or residential address at UBC or within the UEL that does not use the city “Vancouver” in its directions or mailing address, I really cannot understand why we would be the only ones that would not follow suit… how is that helpful to anyone?
docKB - I’m certainly open to reconsidering my opinion if there are Waze-specific considerations I had not considered or am not aware of. If this is the case, I’d be happy to learn. And, I’m certainly aware that you may have already made a firm decision along with other CMs on this issue. If this is the case, just let me know and I’ll drop it.
I like people that question the status-quo. It makes us all take pause, time to think and reflect. You’ve won me over, I was looking at it from a legal aspect (being in the construction industry, building codes are of particular interest to me) but I’m sure we can all agree on this one!
Sent from my SGH-I747M using Tapatalk
Well, I completely understand why the issue could be controversial - it is probably one of the weirder pieces of land in the country, from a legal perspective.
Actually, if not UBC, then the next option is “No City”.
However, we do label unincorporated areas such as Hixon, BC.
The fact that it is part of Metro Vancouver doesn’t make a difference as to its naming – unless we’re going to rename ALL of Metro Vancouver. Which would also be against Waze’s desires – we removed counties (the equivalent of a Regional District in BC) from Alberta a couple of years ago.
Almost nobody, sure. Except the VPL, and other taxpayer-funded endeavours. I bet VPD stops once they hit the boundary, too.
Colloquial usage is not relevant. We’ve had this discussion elsewhere on the forums with regards to the city naming of amalgamated municipalities in Ontario.
And manoeuvre was probably unaware of the unique situation that UBC is.
It’s up for debate… however to prevent a further smudge, we need to make some plans before changing them.
Guildford and Cloverdale are more like “neighbourhoods” in the sense that they are governed by Surrey.
This is like the use of the former municipality names in the now-amalgamated Toronto.
There were some URs a couple years back that this area was marked as “Vancouver” because it isn’t true. That’s what precipitated the initial change.
Actually, Google identifies the area as UBC. Perhaps just by label on the map, though.
No other university in the country has the unique arrangement for the endowment land governance that UBC does.
Agreed - I shouldn’t have brought up Metro Vancouver as it isn’t germane to what I was saying. I am not proposing renaming every city in Metro Van!
This is at least partly true. The RCMP have jurisdiction at both UBC and the UEL, not the VPD. On the other hand, it’s fuzzier in other areas - UEL is serviced by Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services, for example. And if you meant Vancouver Public Library by VPL, turns out that UEL residents are in fact eligible for membership at VPL as non-residents. Because UEL is unincorporated, it has ended up purchasing service agreements from City of Vancouver for many of its services, which further serves to ‘fuzzify’ things.
None of this is really relevant to my argument though, because I’m not contesting the fact that from a legal, official standpoint the UEL is not part of the City of Vancouver. I’m saying that using Vancouver as the city name for these areas is useful and is reflective of the official usage of government, business, and private residences at both UBC & UEL.
I’ve given many examples to show it’s not only colloquial usage, it’s the accepted and official usage by everyone, including the university itself.
Agreed. If we were going this route, we’d have to break Vancouver into municipal areas like Point Grey, Arbutus, Dunbar, Kitsilano, Mount Pleasant, Kerrisdale, etc etc. We’re clearly not going to do that. But UBC/UEL are likewise unlike the aforementioned municipal areas. They are really a quite unique situation, and deserve careful thought.
I think it’s just a label. When you do a search from within the Waze client app, the only “UBC” locations you see are the Waze ones. Google Map Maker looks to be up & running again, and when you go to UBC, you can see all the Google Pins are listed as Vancouver. (Not that I’m advocating following GMM practice in general! But since they rate highly in Waze seraches, especially for auto-complete, it’s a bit of a losing battle to fight the GMM pins)
Cheers, that’s appreciated. No changes will be made without thorough agreement from editing community. I think I’ve made my arguments as best I can, so I’ll sit back and see whether others would like to chime in.
It’s not official. It’s just widely accepted.
There are still plenty of uses of Etobicoke and Scarborough - neither of which technically exists (as any more than a neighbourhood line, anyhow) since 1998’s amalgamation of the metro Toronto area.
UBC technically exists as a location, just like Hixon does.
I’d really like to hear about what problem we’re trying to solve. That “UBC” shows up on the map? That’s a nice feature, no?
Again, the only option other than “UBC” (or some variant) would be “No City”… it is not Vancouver, so that really can’t go on there, despite colloquial usage.
Fair questions…
The essence of the problem is that there is a real disconnect between how literally 100% of government, businesses, and residents within UBC and UEL advertise themselves to the world, and the real underlying legal land tenure. The former is important from the point of view of a navigation app, and the latter, I contend in this very particular and unique case, not in the slightest. The legal land tenure of a place is important inasmuch as it affects how businesses and places self-describe or are obliged to self-describe themselves. For most areas, it’s the be-all and end-all; you’re either in Toronto, or you’re not. If you don’t use the right city, you don’t get your mail, and your mother-in-law gets lost on the way to your house.
The difference between Etobicoke and UBC is that Etobicoke is a former municipality, now neighbourhood of Toronto, and its use is deprecated. Businesses and residences have in very great part switched to using Toronto as the city name, and it’s completely reasonable for Waze to follow suit. UBC on the other hand is a one-of-a-kind bizarre legal entity that to 99.9999% of Vancouverites is indistinguishable from Vancouver itself, and will remain so for the indefinite future (the UEL had a referendum in '96 to form a municipality - it failed and it’s not clear if/when there will ever be another one).
This is how UBC advertises itself:
and this is what it gives as its contact info / address:
Because of the way UEL & UBC entities describe themselves, and probably just as importantly because of the way Canada Post describes them, every single searchable database of places online (the most important of which is Google) list places within the UEL & UBC area as being in “Vancouver”.
This is about as official as you’re going to get without changing the Vancouver Charter, despite it not being legally and cadastrally correct.
I’m really at a loss why Vancouver can’t be used here. When literally 100% of businesses, government, and residential houses self-describe as being in “Vancouver”? There must surely be some value in having Waze search results match well with cross-referenced data elsewhere. At the moment, we are working at cross-purposes with every other online spatial database out there. Surely if there were a conceivable exception to the general rule of not using a city name past city limits, this would be it.
As to UBC technically existing as a location, sure, but can’t we use a Waze Area Place for this? Same as how Pacific Spirit park gets a Waze Area Place. A Waze Area place for UBC, located in the city of Vancouver, would very accurately model how UBC describes itself, how it appears in every online searchable database, and how it is conceived of by Vancouverites.
That’s my 2 cents!
Cheers
But you do get your mail. In fact, CanadaPost is supposedly one of the offenders still using Etobicoke…
Colloquial usages, both.
Because it isn’t correct isn’t a good enough reason?
Let’s start here: this whole thread began with someone complaining that one of the appearance-only city boundary lines had part of Richmond being marked as in Vancouver (or vice versa).
Sure, we could use an area place. And I don’t see a problem with that. But it would be in “No City”.
Again, the problem we’re trying to solve isn’t clear.
- is this affecting searchability of addresses?
- is this affecting navigation?
- is this (incorrectly) affecting how the map appears?
Tell me how this is negatively impacting the Waze experience… because I’m not seeing it at this point.
This is usually when the “, BC” has been included in the city field.
It may be a single street or landmark that is causing it, or worse: two very distant items – because finding them is very tough!
I take responsibility and apologize for making these changes; it appears I’ve walked into a landmine trying to tackle this issue.
I genuinely believed that the city field was being used to make UBC appear more prominently on the client/livemap. Not being from this area, in hindsight I should have discussed with the BC community prior to making any changes.
It appears that UBC is very unique and treated completely different from the way universities are handled in Ontario, where they’re still a part of the incorporated city. I can see that the two arguments are coming from those in and outside of UBC.
Just some observations from my end, as an outsider:
Canada Post
Canada Post appears to have lost some karma points in this discussion because they’re still accepting and delivering “Etobicoke, ON” mail in Toronto.
However, using the reverse postal code search with Canada Post: https://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/apps/fpc/personal/findAnAddress?execution=e1s1
Lets use the postal code for the J.B. Macdonald Building found here: http://www.maps.ubc.ca/PROD/index_detail.php?locat1=198
2199 Wesbrook Mall V6T 1Z3
Canada Post returns “Vancouver, BC”
Searching using UBC, BC
In the waze client, if we manually hit search for “2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC, BC” it does not return anything.
2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC, BC
Auto-complete: 2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC
If we search for “2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC” these are the auto-complete results. It appears that that the second result is the correct one. All the results here are using google markers, none are from waze.
More importantly all of the google results say “Vancouver, BC”.
When dealing with update requests, we stress to users not to rely on the “auto-complete” and to manually hit the search button and review the results.
Manual Search: 2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC
These are the results when you manually hit the search button for “2199 Wesbrook Mall, UBC”. The first result shows an arbitrary point on Wesbrook Mall.
Manual Search: 2199 Wesbrook Mall
If you search for “2199 Wesbrook Mall” it returns “Westbrook Mall, Calgary, AB”
Google Marker v. Waze Residential Places
My feeling is that an outsider navigating to a POI at UBC, they will search for the address including Vancouver, BC. This is all good and well because Google Address markers accepts and displays Vancouver, BC.
The importance of the city field comes into play when the Google Address Marker is not placed correctly, and we have to manually add a “waze residential place” so that it overrides the google marker AND shows up in the auto-complete.
https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=141491
I believe this is where it’s important to have segments and places using “Vancouver” rather than “No City”.
A lot of the place markers in UBC appear to have been added before the major updates to “waze places”; understandably they don’t have the address information in there. I believe in the past we used to put it in the description.
We need to complete the place details for the “waze places” at UBC.
Questions?
How do we expect wazers in the current configuration to navigate to POIs & addresses at UBC?
What should they be typing in their client?
Should they be getting/using google results? Can they use waze results? Are there waze results available for address searches?
Why are we solely relying on the accuracy of google address markers at UBC all of which say “Vancouver, BC”?
Again, as an outsider it appears that the current configuration is solely to make UBC appear prominent on the live maps (note: Wesbrook Mall appears to have the same size font as UBC) and client.
Why are we the only ones trying to treat UBC differently? I believe that we have to focus on how wazers will navigate to addresses/POI on UBC rather than the politics behind the land.
Normally, I would say these are my two cents, but my opinion may be worth a lot less than this.
I can see that a lot of thought and research was put into using “UBC”. codgerd equally has put forward posts which suggests that it’s still a part of “Vancouver”. If we’re making a decision between “no city” and “Vancouver”, why not be pragmatic and use Vancouver?
Lets switch gears to the navigation side, rather than the “smudged city”; because it’s more important how people are navigating to the destination vs. the city names being prominently displayed.
Thanks, manoeuvre.
The one thing I see in your search results is that the city field doesn’t really have any bearing – note when you searched without city, you didn’t get any results returned from UBC area.
The other thing to consider is that, in my experience, most university campuses just use building names for navigation, not street addresses. This means that the only search items that matter are place-mark searches.
1 Like
I have a couple of other points to add, and I understand this conversation doesn’t really belong in this thread, but its a continuation of the conversation, so here goes…
The places were added after waze added the ability to add places in the client and most were added by one user, and they didn’t add all of the information such as street address. When we were evaluating the places feature in the Beta I was of the opinion that they should be added to the map directly, but shortly after “go live” I found it necessary that they should be edited in WME prior to finalization. This allows the location to actually be verified, add web site address, phone number, physical address, opening times etc. Most users don’t bother to add that info when adding the place. The issue now is that once a user gets enough places under their belt, they are trusted and it doesn’t get flushed through WME to get all of the info added and verified. We now have TONS of places in waze that have no real info associated with them, and updating them is masively time consuming.
Secondly, I also thought that UBC should be shown as a separate city and it’s not part of Vancouver. However, I was looking at this from the perspective of the legal entity, which as codgerd pointed out a while ago, doesn’t really have relevance to navigation, so I’m OK with switching to Vancouver.
Finally, if Google results are still favored over waze places, that raises the question of why are we spending so much effort in adding places in the first place? (Incomplete place information asside of course!)
Kayos