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Name Normalization for Wisconsin

Post by GizmoGuy411
Hello Wisconsin editors,

Waze has identified locations in your state as a prime targets in the Great Lakes Region for a MapRaid.

Your state currently lacks clear Name Normalization for statewide standards. (Which needs townships added to the table.)
Your state also currently still lacks a State Manager.

I proposed that these projects be completed before any MapRaid is held in your state.

In the Great Lakes Regions, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio have State Managers, and Michigan and Ohio have established Statewide naming standards.

While Michigan settled on their standards a while ago, Ohio recently completed a very democratic voting process to establish theirs. You can read about their unanimous process in the Name Normalization for Ohio forum post.

Your state has discussed this in past in the County/State Road Standards forum post. I have closed that forum thread and redirected further discussion to this thread.

I would encourage Wisconsin editors and AMs to revive the discussion here and consider the following points.

- Strive to use the nationwide U.S. standards as much as possible. While state specific exceptions are inevitable, please attempt to keep them to the absolute minimum.

- Use the resources we have available to learn how your state names roads in both the text media and on signage.

- Signage is usually the single best indicator for naming.

As examples, in Michigan their signs are all "M-###". This same naming is used to describe their roads in text and also when spoken. Therefore they chose "M-###" to be their state highway naming standard. The Waze text-to-speech system also pronounces them as "emm ###".

Louisiana similarly uses "LA-###" for their state highway naming standard.

Based on signage, spoken standards and common text usage, Ohio voted to adopt the following naming, largely based off of Waze national standards:
“SR-###” for “State Rte ###” (Note that “SH-###” and “State Highway ###” are not used in Ohio.)
“CH-###” for “County Highway ###” (Used only as necessary in some counties)
“CR-###” for “County Road ###”
“TH-###” for “Township Highway ###” (Used only as necessary in some counties)
“TR-###” for “Township Road ###”
(note that a few of these are submitted to Waze for TTS additions and have not yet been added due to TTS server upgrades)

- If you would like to have all of your active AMs to vote on this, I will help devise the list and the voting system similar to what we used for Ohio.

- Discussion of a SM for WI should be in another thread.

- While there is no deadline, we should move on this to be resolved soon after the holidays.

If I add more to this opening post, I will mention it in this thread.

Thanks!
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Post by Bigbear3764
CR-XXX has been used in Wisconsin with success. The only problem that I have seen was the routes with the cardinal direction in them (CR-N, CR-S, CR-E and CR-W) The fix has been to put single quotes around the letter to make it CR-'N'. This has worked.

As for the State Hwys, I think that they are going to be more for the SH-XXX format to say State Highway.

With Wisconsin not having a State Manager as of now, I have been helping out with unlocks and entering road closures for them.
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Post by Bigbear3764
vectorspace wrote: I see now that BigBear is now state manager (congratulations!).
:o WHAT??? I have my hands full with Illinois.
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Post by davielde
vectorspace wrote:This is without regard to good knowledge of what goes on in Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan in case there is a regional preference. I really don't like the "M-xxx" item in Michigan, but what the heck! The good thing about Waze is the flexibility.

I also think CR-XXX should be a standard for County Road. There are a lot of them. Having consistency across the state would be great.
Looking around some of the major cities like Madison, it appears that CR-# is fairly well implemented already. There seemed to be some consensus there is the original thread.

For state highways, I'm curious to see what is decided (betting on SH-# myself, but I don't have any skin in the game). We should not attempt to standardize as a region or follow neighboring states though. Indiana, for example, would probably choose State "Road" of all things, Michigan's "M-#" is non-negotiable from the perspective of TTS pronunciation, etc.
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Post by davielde
Lonewolf147 wrote:The Name Normalization for Wisconsin voting is now closed.

The results are a majority in favor of state highway abbreviation: WIS-###, and county highway abbreviation: CH-XXX.

Thank you to those that participated in this vote.
Are we free to start converting to the new standard, or should we wait for any reason?
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Post by GPP-209
Is there anything we can do to help prep for the mass-renaming?
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Post by KB_Steveo
GizmoGuy411 wrote:- Strive to use the nationwide U.S. standards as much as possible. While state specific exceptions are inevitable, please attempt to keep them to the absolute minimum.

- Use the resources we have available to learn how your state names roads in both the text media and on signage.

- Signage is usually the single best indicator for naming.
State Highways
Wisconsin uses "Hwy" on highway signage (when they do not use shields). "State Hwy ##" is seen on roadside signage, when the highway does not have a "common" name.
In text (on the WisDOT and 511 Wisconsin websites) "WIS" is used. WIS is also used on new digital driver information signs (ex. the ones that say "WIS 24 .. 12 mi .. 14 min")

I would rather see WIS used, but if we have a vote and SH- has the majority, I'm sure I'll get used to it. Those are the only 2 real options I see for Wisconsin state highways, as "route" is NEVER seen in the state (except for places where editors were under the belief that Waze should be under a truly "national" standard, which has since been disagreed on.)

County Highways
We all agreed that we didn't like hearing "coh road", or "coh highway" and CR- was kind of pushed on us by phantomblack, as most county trunk highways were imported as "Co Rd XX" and CH- was not a viable solution to us since TTS didn't say "county highway".
In text (on the websites listed above) these roadways are referred to as "County XX". Highway information signage also just says "Hwy" for county highways. Signage at the overpasses and underpasses also just say "Hwy" Roadside signage is random throughout the state.

I would vote to change these to CH- as long as Gizmo gets his way and Waze adds it to TTS. I'm sure CTH- would be a pipe dream, unless ALL of us really wanted to use that. (besides, 2 out of 3 words isn't bad :lol:)
Bigbear3764 wrote:CR-XXX has been used in Wisconsin with success. The only problem that I have seen was the routes with the cardinal direction in them (CR-N, CR-S, CR-E and CR-W) The fix has been to put single quotes around the letter to make it CR-'N'. This has worked.
Does anyone know why the wiki says that these should be with lower case letters? (ex. CR-'n') I asked this before in the forums and never got a response. Works just fine with upper case, as shown above.
davielde wrote:Looking around some of the major cities like Madison, it appears that CR-# is fairly well implemented already. There seemed to be some consensus there is the original thread.
phantomblack is from the Madison area. He, Lonewolf147 (Milwaukee), davenh (Milwaukee) and I (Green Bay) had a pretty good communication line with each other back when we started converting to CR-XXX
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Post by Lonewolf147
Just a quick note on this thread, KB_Steveo and myself are newly promoted State Managers for Wisconsin. He and I are already starting to discuss things and we'll be sure to keep everyone else up to date on our ideas and such.

As I'm now trudging through a ton of awesome SM available material, as well as some backlogged wiki reading, I may hold off on stronger comments on these issues for a few days while I get caught up.
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Post by Lonewolf147
The Name Normalization for Wisconsin voting is now closed.

The results are a majority in favor of state highway abbreviation: WIS-###, and county highway abbreviation: CH-XXX.

Thank you to those that participated in this vote.
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Post by Lonewolf147
davielde wrote: Are we free to start converting to the new standard, or should we wait for any reason?
Hold off for a bit. Gizmo is going to run some scripts that will do some mass-renaming once he gets a chance to program it. Once that is done, we'll just need to do cleanup as we find missed pieces. I'll post (here and the GHO) when it's done.
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