I think we should focus on what improves the primary focus on the app, and that is navigation. And step one in navigation is finding the correct location to navigate to.

I have a concrete example of some poor guy I've been working for weeks near Rileyville Virginia that I just can't get it so he can give people his address in Waze to route to his house because he's in an unincorporated area. He has a correct house number on his road segment. He put a residential "place" thing correctly that I approved with his street address on it and photo. But nothing works because Waze will by default auto-complete the address as Rileyville postal address and use an incorrect Google result and all attempts I've made to get it corrected in Google mapmaker so far have not been successful because there are multiple mapmaker issues out there. The only way it works is if someone types his address in exactly as "637 xxxxx Ave, VA" (they have to explicitly omit the city to force Waze not to auto-complete a city in it, which is silly to expect a user to remember to do)

(I can PM his details if interested)

So since there are downsides to NOT having a city field defined, I assume there are similar negative impacts that could happen from not having the postal city name in there. Do these same Google fall backs happen if a different name is in the city field? e.g., Pike Creek is in the field instead of Newark or Wilmington?

I think I will break my Dad's house number in Pike Creek in Waze as a test and see if searches for it will failover to Google's correct results. (sort of like the opposite scenario of the above)

As a followup to my own post..... Am I trying to use cities to force a fix for a fundamentally busted system that needs to be fixed at a different level in Waze? Witness:

viewtopic.php?f=129&t=122398&view=unread#p991158

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:There is an existing request in to Waze to implement an additional layer onto which was can draw polygons for neighborhoods, cities, counties, districts, parishes, etc. This has the secondary VERY helpful side effect in that we can then map every segment to the postal address city, thereby significantly increasing the effectiveness of Waze address/house number lookup.

Sigh.... I hate it when I argue with myself.... I can never win.

Are there ANY states using strictly zip codes to determine cities in Waze?

Greets. Would like to resurrect, resolve, and document this in the Delaware wiki page.

I've reviewed the wiki pages for all 50 states. The vast majority don't have anything besides the standard state template language. New Jersey is the only state that says every segment should have a city name. New Jersey also has no unincorporated areas. Some states, like Kentucky, only map incorporated towns. Some others used Census Designated Places (CDP)

No state is using zip codes to designate the city name.

There used to be a problem searching for addresses without a city name but I'm not seeing that now. I tested removing the city name from a street and purposely forced a house number on that street to a wrong location (my parent's house in Pike Creek ... I know they don't use Waze). When I search for this address, it shows it as in Wilmington (I assume from Google) but the search result shows the incorrect location (so I know the pin is coming from Waze, not Google). Other houses on that street are correct (they are unbumped so don't know if coming from Google or Waze)

Whatever is chosen, it should be something where any street at any location in the state can be verified from a public source as to what it should be so there's no guesswork.

I propose the following standard, in priority order:

* Incorporated area
* CDP (Census Designated Place) -- that would have "cities" for Pike Creek and Brookside, for example
* Special cases that are discussed in this forum, approved, then documented in the wiki as an exception, if it can be determined the boundaries of said special case.
* If none of the above, set city name to none

Also, freeways set to none. Some other states do this (MD and PA). I mainly like it for maintainability. Segmenting a freeway just to change the city name seems a bit silly. However, the BDP (big detour penalty) reason for not putting a city name on a freeway doesn't apply now due to recent changes to that policy (it ignores cities) so it's not as big of a deal as it used to be.

Maryland's policy appears to be the closest to what I am proposing.

There's another component to this that I forgot. Public places (business listings). For that I propose the city field should be the postal city as part of the businesses address. I've done some testing and it does not effect the city layer in WME.

The city field in WME for segments seems to be primarily for:

1) Showing the name of the city in the app, centered in the area usually. On some color schemes it will also color the city layer a little different so you can see boundaries.

2) On advanced road reports while driving. Those things that pop up when you're sitting at a red light. Like "accident reported on I-95 near Newark"

Amazingly, it does NOT appear to affect searching that much. As stated before, my parents live in Pike Creek but postal address is Wilmington. I moved their address pin to a wrong location to test to ensure Waze is reporting its own results. I tried with no city on the street, and with Pike Creek on the street. In both cases, it shows in search results as Wilmington (I assume getting that from Google) but the returned result is the Waze location. Also if you pull down to see more of the search result, THEN it says Pike Creek.

So the next step in this process (if no one else has any concerns) is to make sure our other SM (mreiser) is OK with it, and then run it past our RC (orbitc), then I codify it in the state wiki page.

Then we can start fixing really bad cases of out-of-place city layers that are causing "tearing" in the app, and as time permits just correct other segments.

I've created a Google Map of the CDPs of Delaware. It shows most of the state would be "no city" With a few exceptions it lines up with what people commonly refer to as the areas.... If you browse the map it will give you a good idea what is being proposed.

I can see a few areas that might cause people some concern. Brookside is a CDP, but in real life it's a housing development. The Brookside CDP is larger than the development. So someone in Todd Estates might whine if their search for their house shows it is in Brookside.

Of course this map can be edited and we could change it for exceptions or add new areas with consensus. My main concern in all of this is there's a definitive reference so no editor has to guess.

Thinking this could even be used to create a map overlay for Waze similar to the raid overlays to make it easier to define.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't know of any state that puts neighborhoods in to the city field. CDP is about as granular as they get. As noted above though, Delaware does have a neighborhood that is also a CDP -- Brookside.

Oh wow, I see I didn't put a link to my Google Map showing the CDPs

Here it is:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid= ... kHjq4AcnPc

jondrush wrote: Ahem:
https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/PA#Cities_and_towns

I think you are on the right track. Let Google worry about zip code search.

I stand corrected. Thanks!

Poncewattle wrote: I can see a few areas that might cause people some concern. Brookside is a CDP, but in real life it's a housing development. The Brookside CDP is larger than the development. So someone in Todd Estates might whine if their search for their house shows it is in Brookside.

The topic that won't die

As feared, I have a UR from someone in Todd Estates is upset that he is being shown to be in Brookside. So now I'm thinking, since there aren't that many CDPs that are not also incorporated areas, just to scale this back to be incorporated areas only -- if not, set city name to no name.

Also, having a "city" named "Dover AFB Housing" (which is a CDP) is a little silly.

Quite a few other states have this standard.

kodi75 wrote:An older post, but mapcat explains the problem with trying to adjust the city layer.

Well that's interesting. So basically without staff intervention (Carl helped me get a city deleted before), we can't shrink them, just expand them. So maybe I'm obsessing about this too much.

It really doesn't matter I guess except for some people like from that UR who object to being in Brookside when they aren't...



(that street segment is from a small corner of "Brookside" that I edited the city out of as a test and it didn't shrink, as that post explains...)