Waze forum

I've noticed that in the Inland Empire, these come and go for me. It's not a swarm of problems as with OP's screenshot, but zooming in/out seems to make them sporadically appear and disappear. They're gone for a while when they disappear, but they come back on their own when they feel like it.

In my area the zip maps were ignored at the base map import. Municipal boundaries as recognized by the state and a few, larger CDPs were all that was imported, so that is the practice we have continued here.

Why don't you use cityname, countyname format to guarantee uniqueness? That's what we do in PA.

skapur1 wrote: I was under the impression that local usage wins in Waze. In NYC metro area (including Long Island and NJ), zip codes are much more meaningful as are the boroughs. In other areas where local government is more united it may be different.

As I have said before we have several governmental organizations on Long Island (Town tax department, Town highway department, Water authority, Power Authority, Fire district, school district, Census bureau, Election commission, Post Office ...) each with their own different boundary for the same locality on their own GIS systems.

People on this forum insist on using a government boundary. My question is: Which of the above governments boundary should we use?

I vote for the Post Office zip code for the Long Island and New Jersey area. Other areas with a more united government should pick other ways to define boundaries.

What does the state say the boundary is? That's what we use in PA.

In MD, much of the state is unincorporated. Zip codes boundaries are your best option there.

Your state gives me a headache!

I think it was done by Waze to relieve the conflict when both municipalities had the same name on import of basemap.

I think we may have to settle for different rules in different states and/or countries. In New Jersey, the base map seems to kind of have municipal boundaries, but a lot of them seem to be "Areas" surrounding nearby by better-known towns (e.g., Old Bridge Area, Woodbridge Area, etc.). This, IMHO, is worse than any other alternative methods I've seen discussed about this in these forums.

Municipal boundaries would be ideal, since they are recognized by the state, but a strict municipal boundary rule in New Jersey would create naming conflicts in Waze, as we have several Washington Townships, Springfield Townships, and Union Townships (just for starters) in different counties across the state. This creates a problem in Waze because it tries to draw a single polygon around all of them (and now even puts down automated UR (AR?) pins) even though they are not the same "cities."

Zip codes provide the only completely objective system in New Jersey that is guaranteed to be unique by city name throughout the entire state. Of course, the downside is that you lose things like true municipal, and in some cases even county boundaries, but personally, I think it's more important for Waze to not try to draw incorrect single city polygons clear across the state.

I could - I just thought it looked dumb.

The real problem is the town/township issue where in many places the individual towns within a township are better known than the township itself. But if political boundaries are that important, I guess I could just use official municipality names.

Does this also mean that all 5 boroughs of New York City should just say "New York?" That hardly sounds right in Queens, for example, where everyone commonly refers to the neighborhood names, including the post office?

Also, it's not so much the zip code itself (I think we're putting too much emphasis on that in this discussion) as it is about the city name the post office uses with those zip codes. That's what city names the vast majority of New Jersey is known by, and contrary to other parts of the country, those city names do not change frequently because they are so well colloquially known.

If we're going to go strictly by municipal names, then I would at least put the word "Township" at the end of township names here in New Jersey, especially the ones that are better known by their local member town names, e.g. South Brunswick Township instead of Monmouth Junction, or Woodbridge Township instead of Colonia.

Does anyone know if there are any plans to make the Twp abbreviation readable as Township? It is an official abbreviation used by the state all over the place. Last time I checked, the Waze TTS did not read Twp correctly.

Another thing I've noticed recently about NJ: the state's official signage along highways only marks officially incorporated municipalities. In other words, they tell you you're entering South Brunswick Township, but there is no official state sign anywhere telling you you're entering or otherwise approaching Monmouth Junction, a member town within South Brunswick Township that the area is better known by. Same thing with Woodbridge Township - there is no official state "Entering Colonia" sign anywhere. Member towns like Monmouth Junction or Colonia do however appear on official highway directional signs, such as those at intersections or exit signs, etc.

We have the "Greater XXXXX Area" names on the map all over my central NJ area as well. What's worse is their polygons are less accurate than both municipal boundaries and zip code boundaries! I've never seen maps of NJ described like this anywhere, ever, so I'm guessing these came from the initial base maps used to create the database, or some rule somewhere to fill in the gaps where the correct information wasn't available.