Right on, the streets up in the Davis/Weber area are where I've found the greatest variations from the standard. With numbered streets the convention is Direction Number Direction as in (S 200 E). It feels unusual to use directional indicators twice but seems to be the standard in navigation systems and just something that we here in Utah have to get used to.

As the Text To Speech system translates E and East both into a full verbalization of East (and same with all cardinal directions), abbreviating the directional indicators is preferred. Similarly unless the street name is something other than street, we should just leave the St off. Rd, Ln, Cir, Ct, Ave, Blvd and other types of roads do need to be put in, but St does not.

Now as to Utah naming versus Navigation naming. You'd think it would make perfect sense to separate an address into two complete coordinates as in the X,Y Cartesian grid system that our addresses are based on. Thus in Utah we will have a house number of 63 S, on street 100 W. With our grid system we know as long as you know you are on the right grid group (city based in most of Utah, County wide in Salt Lake County) you can quickly find and navigate yourself to any address if given the two coordinates. But the Nav world decided to do addresses as follows. You have a house/building number 63, 744, 1843 or what ever it is. Then the streets are broken into two halves based on the center point, E 100 N and W 100 N (we treat them as 100 N) or N 100 E and S 100 E. And we have no choice but to adapt to the Nav world because this is how every nav system out there handles addresses.

So a proper designation for 63 East 100 West is: 63, E 100 W. Abbreviate the cardinal directions the TTS will translate them correctly this has been verified. I would also recommend when editing a named road that you put the street number in the alternate names field if you know it.

Not that this will affect how Waze navigates to a point, just the directions as given by the TTS. All address searches are bounced by default to Bing maps (a big cause of bad direction problems), Bing returns a lat long coordinate and then Waze tries to navigate to the closest road segment to the given coordinate. You can choose Google maps after you do a search, just slide the icon next to the directions from the Bing B to the Google G and it'll do another search. That said, getting users used to this format will aid in address searches as they are more effective if you separate the building number from the street when doing a search and some Nav devices (my TomTom for example) require you to make this separation in order to do an address search.

Bing and Google are both smart enough to adjust for just about any version of a direction, W or West, S, So, South etc... and actually for other variations, 300 W, 300 W., 300 w, 300 W., 300 West, 300 west, 300 WEST, and even 300 just 300 they'll try to give you relevant options for. For example I can put my address in with all those different variations for either portion of the address and as there is only one house number that high on the two possible 200 streets in my town's grid, both engines picked , plotted and fully spelled out the correct address every time, and that's without using the St modifier at all.

So putting it in as an alternate is not necessary as the search engines already handle all spelling and abbreviation variations of the cardinal directions with ease.

I'd agree with you but I still think putting in the directions before and after the street help if only by getting Utahn's used to how the rest of the world thinks we should do our maps (even though our system makes far more sense and works far better).

That said I think what we really should as much as possible do instead is do our best, whenever possible, to find the number for named streets (they don't always put it on the signs but every street in Utah also gets a number assigned based on it's location on the local grid) and put the number designation in as an alternate. It really shouldn't matter but I'm seeing some things that indicate Waze is trying to move to being their own address search provider and having accurate street numbers with proper N S E W indicators before and after either the primary or the alternate names is going to be key to getting this to work right.

As to W Chester we probably need a colon after the W as that inserts an additional pause by the TTS before it continues to the next word. Or if that looks weird on the client perhaps a comma, though I'm not certain if that will add sufficient pause.

Hi! I'm trying to get back into Waze editing and couldn't quite tell if a consensus had been reaching on road naming conventions. Would it work to add in the __ # __ as an alternate street name and keep the # __ as the main street name?

Also, can someone tell me what the u-turn markers at the end of road segments are for (mainly if it means something other than indicating where the directions engine can process a u-turn?)

I'm not sure that navigation uses the alt name, so the _ # _ name should be used (which is what we've been doing).

The U-turns are basically like other turn restrictions (I think), in that you can "hard" specify if they're allowed or not, or leave them as "soft". There's a lot of discussion about them in the forums so you can probably find more info there.

I agree with the __ # __ convention. But, how about the __ (some street name) __ convention? I think it is overkill and we should just have a street name, which I see done in some places but not others. For example, I have seen "Mill Shadow Dr" and on the other side of the intersection "W Mill Shadow Dr S". I don't think the W and the S add anything here. As a side note, the official city map lists the street as simply "Mill Shadow Dr".

Any disagreement?

EDIT: I just saw "W Chester Ln" which when read by TTS could confuse a driver into looking for "Westchester Ln".

With that said, naming in the "N 300 W" notation, which I completely agree with, there are others, who view the "N 300 W" as a street name and try to search for "W 300 West St". This is the way a lot of streets are named in bing and google. Should we be adding that format (spelling out the 2nd direction with "St" at the end) as an alternate street name? That way when you search for them, it will find either one.

For streets named "N 300 West St" and I search for "N 300 W" in the editor, it will show a list of close streets and make me choose the one spelled out.

What are your thoughts at spelling out the 2nd cardinal and adding St at the end as an alternate street name?