UK road numbers

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

I emailed the following suggestion to the Waze Support Team…….

“Waze calls the A316 the “A three sixteen”. In the UK we never say
that. We say “the A three one six”. Likewise Waze calls the A3004
the “thirty Oh Four”. In the UK we never say that. We say the “A three Oh
Oh four”. I suggest that you localise Waze for use in the UK to say the
road numbers as we say them. The “rules” are as follows.

(a) 1 to 100: Say the number, eg One, Two, ten, eleven, ninety, ninety
nine, one hundred.

(b) The hundreds, 100, 200, 300 up to 900: Say the number. eg one hundred,
two hundred, three hundred, nine hundred.

(c) The thousands, 1000, 2000, 3000 etc: Say the number. eg one thousand,
two thousand, nine thousand.

(d) All other numbers: Say the numbers individually. eg one-oh-one,
one-oh-two, two-eight-six, nine-nine-nine, one-oh-oh-one (although
one-double-oh-one is acceptable), three-oh-oh-four, two-three-eight-four.”

The reply from the Waze Support Team was “Please know that the current way of reading road numbers was requested by the UK community themselves.”

Did the UK community really ask Waze to say the UK road numbers incorrectly?

2

We have discussed how road numbers are read out here on the forum, I think it was this thread (2014).

One problem is that numbers are spoken differently in different parts of the country, partly due to regional accents but also because of how the road numbers are distributed.

Since then we’ve switched from Nuance to Google’s speech engine (2015), so we may have ended up with slightly different rules for road numbers. I can’t find any written reference for how road numbers should be spoken, and it seems that neither WME nor Google Translate reads the numbers the same way as the app does.

I accept that “ay thirty oh four” is less than ideal, and many of us have enjoyed hearing “ay four fourteen six” near Milton Keynes.

If we can agree on a better scheme then we can ask Waze to implement it…

3

That thread is This one that I started last year about the A4146 in Milton Keynes…

Waze pronounces it (as you said) as A 4 14 6.