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Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by garyd9
Take a look at this segment:

https://www.waze.com/en-US/editor?env=u ... 959&zoom=7

The road here is named "William Flinn Hwy." The local GIS data has it as "William Flynn Hwy" I live a few miles away, and when I saw the street that I know as "William Flynn Hwy" being called "William Flinn Hwy", I figured that a large editing job was ahead...

Yet... maybe not?

This kept me awake, so I pulled up SV (inside of WME) and found that in many places, it's actually marked on the green signs as "Flinn." In a few places, there are signs with "Flynn." As a "local", I've never known anyone to use "Flinn" - they all use "Flynn" (and here in Pittsburgh, we tend to ignore street signs as they only lead to confusion.)

According to the USPS, it's "Flynn" (not Flinn) and even the USPS website lists the mailing address for post offices on that road as "William Flynn Hwy." (example: https://tools.usps.com/go/POLocatorDeta ... -79.947115)

So... what's going on? Well, according to PENNDOT (state transportation department) it's supposed to be "Flinn." Legally, according to PENNDOT, there's no such thing as "William Flynn Highway" (in the Pittsburgh region) even if every business, the post office, GIS data, tax data, and common usage says that there is. Want to have fun with this? Go to USPS.com and use their "create a label" website entering any address in "allison park, PA" with a street name of "william flinn hwy." It will auto correct it to "WILLIAM FLYNN HWY" as soon as you try to submit.

For some historical on it, feel free to google "penndot william flynn signs"

All that leads to the question: What should waze use? This impacts both street names AND every single "place" on the map along this road (with either usage.) I guess HN's will fix themselves automagically if/when a street name is changed.

I realize there are street name aliases, but the primary name for a street is what people see when they are driving/routing. For that reason, and as a "local" to the area, I'd suggest using "Flynn" with "Flinn" as an alias. Here in the Pittsburgh region, we're very attached to tradition (especially in regards to the region's dialect/grammar.

Obviously, this is something that should be decided "higher up" than a newbie L1 editor.
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by garyd9
(Please pardon me while I play devil's advocate here..)

So, the waze map's primary name matches the street sign... but which street sign? The signs vary. A scaled map having different primary names for a road looks sloppy. A road with different signs doesn't look quite so bad when it's in Western PA. The hills and curves prevent you from looking back and seeing the previous street sign. ;) (Not to mention that we all tend to ignore those little green signs anyway.) On a map, we see all the different road names at the same time.

Also, I'm surprised that we match the green street sign for road names, but for other things (such as township/CDP names) we follow "local custom." That's inconsistent and leaves everyone unhappy. It also leaves Waze maps unmatched to any pattern. Waze won't match the post office, won't match what a local business claims for itself, won't match local custom, won't match GIS data, and won't match what a complete tourist to an area might expect.

To be clear, I'm arguing the point only for the sake of discussion. I don't have a "better solution, and I don't expect to change anything (but I do expect to better understand the expectations of waze editing in PA.)
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by garyd9
Oh, and just to add to the confusion for this particular road, there are also some green signs that use the state number: "Route 8" or "PA-8"

(When my wife and I moved to Western PA, one of the first things we did was to buy a GPS. After a week, the GPS committed suicide.)
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by garyd9
ugh, I've been doing place name city's wrong then. :( I've been trying to match a "place" city to the city on the closest road segment.

Most business (that have a website) tend to publish their address using their postal city (and street name) but also refer to some other municipality or CDP.

To be clear, then:

Assume a business, "PLACE", is located on a waze map segment "ROAD." SV or eyeball examinations of the closest intersection show a green sign calling the road "William Flinn Hwy."

At the spot where PLACE is located on ROAD, the CDP is "Richland", the physical municipality is "Hampton" and the postal zipcode is "Allison Park." The business website (assuming they have one) shows the business address as "1234 Rt 8, Allison Park, PA" (they want to get their mail, after all.) That same website also refers to the business as "The best shop in Gibsonia!" The locals call the area "just past the walmart, where the tire shop used to be." According to GIS parcel and tax data, the business is located at "1234 William Flynn Highway" and a USPS postal address search shows the same as GIS.

Given all that...

In waze, the road segment should be called "William Flinn Hwy" with a city of "Richland" and the PLACE should have an address of HN: 1234, Street: Rt 8; City: "just past the walmart" "Allison Park." It is acceptable that the "place" street and city don't match the road segment street/city (and therefore the HN data auto-generated by Waze.)

Am I on the right track?
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by RussPA
What we usually do is match the primary name to the street sign since that is what drivers will see, as you mentioned. To maintain road name continuity, we put whatever other names might be used as an alternate name. So even if Flinn and Flynn are interchanged as primary names, as long as they both exist in some primary or alternate name combination, searches will work just like they should and people can search for either name and get to their destination. There are a few areas throughout the state where street signs change spelling like this, and this is how we handle it.
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Last edited by RussPA on Tue Apr 09, 2019 12:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by RussPA
There are areas where the signs change and there are ways we can setup the segments to display for the user the road name that matches the signs while not causing the overall map display to show the varying spellings. Waze gives us some options in the editor for handling situations like this.

City names, on the other hand, don't display on the map, so it's not as big an issue. For places, we do try to match the city name that the business uses as their address so that when a user searches for a business, the information displayed will match what they expect to see. This has no effect on navigation, so we have more freedom here. There is also a search engine tie-in to Google that helps deal with some of the issues you mentioned, but that's a whole different story to get into.

The city name we attach to segments, on the other hand, should match the Census Bureau naming for an area. Often times this does not match local custom or USPS names. Some areas can have 4 or 5 different names, one or more local usage names, USPS name, Census name, so that's why we standardized on Census names a long time ago. Even two locals to the same area might call their area two different names, so it is a challenge. And again, the tie-in to Google search helps with these issues as well.
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by sikemever
The other good example of this is "1st St" and "First St". Often times the GIS will show an ordinal number but the actual signs spell out the street. As RussPA stated, we match what the driver sees but we put in the other reference in the Alt name so navigational searches work properly.

The other great example in PA is "Cemetery St". The word cemetery has some very interesting spellings in Pennsylvania where GIS says Cemetery but signs say Cematery or Cemetary. There are dozens of these within the commonwealth.
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by sikemever
Google fixes the issue. As RussPA said it doesn't display on the map but is important for searches. The fact that the map isn't littered with UR's tells you that it's working just fine the way we have it.
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by voludu2
There are a lot of trade-offs, and no choice we make for guidance on street names and city names is 100% perfect. We think the guidance we are currently following is better than the alternatives, but we are always discussing guidance, especially when there are changes to the tools and features available.
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Re: Road Naming - discrepancies across "official" sources

Post by voludu2
You are getting there.

1) the address in a public place (anything other than a residential place) is never used for address search.
2) residential places (RPP) exist solely for address search (and for the photos).

In PA, we don't have firm guidance for public places on whether to use the city name from the street segment the place is on or the mailing address from the business website. So you see a lot of both in PA
When someone types in a business name, they will see the address associated with it, which will help them decide which Dunkin' they want to drive to.

For RPP, they are only useful if they use the street name and city name that the user is actually going to type in. Often, users don't get past the street name. And if they know the highway is SUPPOSED to be Flynn, despite the incorrect PennDOT signs everywhere, they are going to type Flynn. Then, whether Gibsonia or Allison Park pops up in autocomplete, they are probably happy since they know both are correct. Unless one of them is actually a dreaded "bad Google address pin". Then if they choose that one they'll drive to the wrong location. We often fix bad google pins, and if we can't we try to plaster them over with good waze HNs and RPPs (as appropriate).

I'm assuming that the Flinn / Flynn choice was made by an experienced editor recently enough that they would have had decent information at their finger tips (non-blurry SV, access to GIS resources, PennDOT Straight Line Diagrams. We don't count the road names we see in 511PA because that is actually showing us Google Maps results). I have not looked at it myself.
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