by gordonski » Thu Jul 12, 2012 8:16 am
I totally agree with GPSRitter!
In Germany and many other European countries a simple field for city does not suffice for defining places. Over here towns and villages are administered by a city or a municipality. There can be duplicate names within such a municipality but never within one village.
On the other hand, using only the township/village name won't do either, because, as GPSRitter pointed out, villages or townships don't always have unique names within the country or state*.
So, to have an exact (postal) address you need the street name and the city/municipality name + village name or ZIP code.
If Waze does not always want to depend on 3rd party services such as Bing or Google to find adresses (and there are rumors, that this is in planning), it definitely needs to introduce at least one more field for either the ZIP code or the township name.
Another aspect is the generation of traffic reports in the client. When naming everything to just "Berlin" that administratively belongs to Berlin (i.e. the city itself and all surrounding suburbs) you get a relatively huge area. This area contains about a hundred miles of different freeways. When there is a traffic jam on one of these, Waze will announce a traffic jam "near Berlin". Not very helpful, it might just as well say "Oh there's a traffic jam, but I ain't tellin' you where. Good luck, young padawan!"
In this case township name would be more helpful than the ZIP code. Further more a name would also look much nicer in the map. And in Germany ZIP codes follow a weird pattern so two or more villages can have the same ZIP code but there are also towns with multiple ZIP code areas. Hence I would prefer township name over ZIP code.
However an additional field to precisely define towns and streets is badly needed here!
Regards,
Gordonski
*concerning the state field: It would be cool, if we (the party of folks living on continents known as "rest of world", which by the way constitutes the vast majority of the world population) could be able to use the state field. Filling it with "other" is useless! Why not let editors fill in values here just like they do in the city field?
