Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:24 am

Hi fellow editors,

We're trying an experiment in the Dublin area: in order for the name "Dublin" to appear on the live map when zoomed out (at the moment, just Limerick, Waterford and Ennis appear!), we've added the city name of "Dublin" to all segments of the M50. After the next tile update, we're hoping that "Dublin" will appear on the map, but also that there are no negative side effects. We can undo the change very quickly if there are any problems.

There should hopefully not be any serious problems, but please look out for anything strange. Two things that might happen are:

1. Routing to "Dublin" might route to the centre of the "Dublin" city and this may be somewhere other than O'Connell Street. (that's because up to now, we've had a couple of segments on O'Connell St with the city name "Dublin" so that people routing to "Dublin" get sent there)
2. Traffic reports in Waze may now report problems (especially on or around the M50) as being "between XXX an Dublin" or "near Dublin" - but if this happens, reports like this won't be that much use, since if you're on the M50, you probably already know you're somewhere near Dublin, and that information doesn't give you much idea of where the traffic really is.

Anyway, after the next tile update (the last one was on 13 April, so for this change to go live, we need a tile update that incorporates changes after 1800 (that's 1700 UTC) on 16 April), please report any problems to this thread you might notice related to Waze's use of the name "Dublin". Most especially report anything related to routing.

The change came about as a result of a discussion in this thread. As I said, if the experiment has any serious negative consequences or has no useful effect at all, we'll undo the change.

thanks!

++David \ davidg666

davidg666: Waze Local Champs; Posts: 1136; Answers: 1; Answers: 1; Has thanked: 97 times; Been thanked: 243 times

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by CTCNetwork Sat Apr 19, 2014 5:28 pm

Hi,

Looks like Dublin is showing in the map now..

Des. . .

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by CTCNetwork Tue Apr 22, 2014 2:15 pm

Hi,

I was going to say that if you have, by way of debate and decision, decided to name areas within Dublin as Dublin 1 and Dublin 2 then their existence will remove weight to anything named "Dublin".

I suspect that Dublin 1 or Dublin 2 will not be large enough areas or have enough streets to have that much of an impact as a city polygon when zoomed out. They should be showing when you zoom in though..

Is there, by any chance a central core of Dublin that is actually the city of Dublin in and of it's own right (similar to City of London in London)? Adding that will help push the weight to the correct city area..

Des. . .

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by CTCNetwork Tue Apr 22, 2014 4:48 pm

Hi,

Distinct names create their own city polygon and as such have no bearing on any similarly named "city" areas. Hence Dublin 1 and Dublin 2 both show and are of similar sizes.
The newly created or extended Dublin polygon is created and has the name placed roughly in the middle of the polygon. Add some streets off centre and the position of the "Dublin" will shift slightly. So with you adding Dublin to the bridges this should shift the name to a more central location. I suspect that landmark locations will also have an effect on this as well. Maay be worth investigating.

Ennis has shown up because there are quite a few streets and I have been slowly finding their names and adding them. I do notice that on closed zoom with os maps and google there appear to be "localities" but given that Ennis is not particularly huge and some of these local area are only a few streets it would detract from my finding names for streets and labelling them Ennis.

It will be interesting to see (whenever they do get round to it) how a city would show on the map with it's own county... I'll not hold my breath..

Des. . .

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Mon Apr 21, 2014 7:15 pm

CTCNetwork wrote:Looks like Dublin is showing in the map now..

Excellent! I did notice two things though:

1. If you zoom in a little, the "Dublin" is showing over Tymon Park in the southwest of the city, over part of the M50. Not sure why though - however I'll take a closer look.
2. *Before* the tile update, I noticed that navigating to "Dublin" on the Live Map routed one to the same location on the M50 in the middle of Tymon Park. A little odd too.

Aside from that, has anybody noticed anything odd, or any negative side effects, related either to routing or to traffic reporting?

++David \ davidg666

davidg666: Waze Local Champs; Posts: 1136; Answers: 1; Has thanked: 97 times; Been thanked: 243 times

Country manager and local champ for Ireland

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Tue Apr 22, 2014 1:05 pm

davidg666 wrote:1. If you zoom in a little, the "Dublin" is showing over Tymon Park in the southwest of the city, over part of the M50. Not sure why though - however I'll take a closer look.
2. *Before* the tile update, I noticed that navigating to "Dublin" on the Live Map routed one to the same location on the M50 in the middle of Tymon Park. A little odd too.

Alright - by way of further experiment, I've added the city name of "Dublin" to most of the bridges over the Liffey in the city centre, as well as the R139 between the north-east corner of the M50 and Baldoyle. This is to see if that will cause Waze to consider the centre of "Dublin" to be closer to the centre of the city. I'm speculating that it's currently considering the centre to be about half way along the length of the M50, near Tallaght, since (until a few minutes ago) the M50 road segments have been the only road segments with "Dublin" for a city name.

This experiment remains an experiment, and I'll be quite happy to undo it if it has any negative side-effects.

We used to have a couple of road segments just off O'Connell St with the city name of "Dublin" (I think the intention was that attempts to route to "Dublin" would take people here) but these no longer exist - I imagine somebody thought they were a mistake and either removed them or changed their name to "Dublin 1".

I'm not sure where Waze would have routed somebody before this experiment, although even before the first tile update that included the change to the M50, it was routing to that point in the M50 in the middle of Tymon Park. I do notice that if you pick Google search results when routing, you do get sent to the city centre - although I imagine Google has better control over the location and boundaries of cities than Waze does.

++David \ davidg666

davidg666: Waze Local Champs; Posts: 1136; Answers: 1; Has thanked: 97 times; Been thanked: 243 times

Country manager and local champ for Ireland

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Tue Apr 22, 2014 2:33 pm

Hi Des,

CTCNetwork wrote:I was going to say that if you have, by way of debate and decision, decided to name areas within Dublin as Dublin 1 and Dublin 2 then their existence will remove weight to anything named "Dublin".

Well we've had the city centre area (that has no suburb "name" of its own) named as "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" for as long as I can remember. What do you mean about their existence removing weight to anything named "Dublin"? These names all start the same, of course, but are otherwise distinct.

CTCNetwork wrote:I suspect that Dublin 1 or Dublin 2 will not be large enough areas or have enough streets to have that much of an impact as a city polygon when zoomed out. They should be showing when you zoom in though..

They are indeed showing when zoomed in (just like all other suburbs are) - but they're also not physically larger than any other district in the city.

CTCNetwork wrote:Is there, by any chance a central core of Dublin that is actually the city of Dublin in and of it's own right (similar to City of London in London)? Adding that will help push the weight to the correct city area..

I guess there's the area enclosed by the old city walls, but this is very small indeed, and also overlaps with some other areas that have their own name that isn't "Dublin". However, the combination of "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" can probably quite reasonably be considered to be the core of the city. The area within the canals (more-or-less) is the administered by the city council (as opposed to the three county council areas for the remaining parts of the county of Dublin).

Anyway, since the Dublin postal district numbers will be going away eventually (if postcodes ever finally arrive...) I reckon merging the existing "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" into a single city of "Dublin" might not be a bad idea at all. (if we do do that, however, I think we should get Waze to do it centrally, since it'd be a huge job to manually rename every single road segment in the city... (how did you handle the renaming of all the parts of greater London?))

++David \ davidg666

davidg666: Waze Local Champs; Posts: 1136; Answers: 1; Has thanked: 97 times; Been thanked: 243 times

Country manager and local champ for Ireland

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:29 am

davidg666 wrote:Alright - by way of further experiment, I've added the city name of "Dublin" to most of the bridges over the Liffey in the city centre, as well as the R139 between the north-east corner of the M50 and Baldoyle. This is to see if that will cause Waze to consider the centre of "Dublin" to be closer to the centre of the city. I'm speculating that it's currently considering the centre to be about half way along the length of the M50, near Tallaght, since (until a few minutes ago) the M50 road segments have been the only road segments with "Dublin" for a city name.

Good news: although there hasn't been another tile update, Waze will now route to the city centre (just by the Ha'penny Bridge) when you ask to be routed to "Dublin", both in the app and in Live Map.

In the editor, the label for "Dublin" now also appears in the city centre. In the Live Map, it's still appearing over Tymon Park, but I imagine this will change when there's a tile update.

It looks like Waze's routing engine picks up changes independently of tile updates. Interesting...

++David \ davidg666

davidg666: Waze Local Champs; Posts: 1136; Answers: 1; Has thanked: 97 times; Been thanked: 243 times

Country manager and local champ for Ireland

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Re: Dublin editors: showing "Dublin" in the map

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by davidg666 Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:17 am

dmeehan wrote:Why are all streets not marked with City = Dublin ?

Because (like many other cities of a reasonable size) they're marked with their suburb name - so you can tell Waze to navigate you to "Finglas" or "Tallaght" or wherever and that's where you'll be taken - and traffic reports can say something like "heavy traffic between Blanchardstown and Coolock".

We decided to do something similar for the four largest cities in Ireland (Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway) and many other cities around the world have done something similar. In the UK, for example, there's no longer a "London" on the Waze map - just the various suburbs and districts of the greater city of London.

I think this works fairly well in Dublin and Cork so far, although Limerick and Galway aren't quite there yet. There's a thread elsewhere in this forum (from about a year ago, if not more...) where we discussed it - and as soon as I get around to it, I'll be writing it up in a wiki page - along with other notes about how we name cities, towns and villages around Ireland.

does that sound reasonable?

++David \ davidg666