House numbers page

[LarryHI1]

I'm not sure that I have read all the posts on this subject, but I'm here because this morning I tried to enter a hyphenated address on Oahu for the first time, and Waze would not take it. It drops the second half of the address whether I include a hyphen or not.

I discovered in 2007 that TomTom devices would not take the hyphenated addresses, and reported it to their customer service. Others had apparently beat me to it, because TomTom was well aware of the situation--and didn't care to fix it. I think it was only 2012 (?) when a version of their software came out that had hyphens on their keyboard. Meanwhile, they did accurately navigate to restaurants and other pre-loaded addresses with hyphens.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of addresses in Hawaii have hyphens.

Stores (at least the responsible ones) advised potential TomTom buyers of the problem. I was in a Best Buy when a military guy consulted a sales person about what would be a good GPS to buy. I overheard the sales person (an honest fellow) cautioning the customer that the TomTom models would not handle any of the addresses near where he lived, or elsewhere on Oahu.

There are highways where the number after the hyphen makes all the difference. There could be a couple of miles, I understand, between one end an the other of a hyphenated street number.

I hope this will be treated with great seriousness. It also affects parts of New Jersey and I'm sure other areas that use a similar scheme.

I am a newbie here, if someone can suggest to me a way to raise the profile of this issue, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

P.S. Google Maps, as an example, has no trouble with accepting hyphenated addresses.

[kentsmith9]

Has anything in the interface or operation of House Numbers change for the recent editor updates? I don't recall off hand, but wanted to see if we need to update anything on our House Numbers article.

[kentsmith9]

I'm not sure we have enough information to act on this yet. We don't know if house numbers should be added to only one side of a split street. Might there be a reason to add it to both? (can't think of any off-hand).

I assumed this would be a straight forward answer. If you get routed to the street closest to the house that can be driven (vs. the back yard when the house is on a long driveway and there is a street behind it), then we must map only the side of split roads that actually takes you to the driveway of the house in question.

If you put the house numbers only on one side of the split road, then half of the houses will be routed to the wrong side of the street with U-turns being forced leaving you on the wrong side.

Also, I'm not sure about the merging thing. If you take both sides and put them together and turned to two-way, do all house numbers remain?

I would expect if you have house numbers on each of the split roads then you need to get all the house numbers back to a single two-way road. I would think this is a monumental task for a long roads with hundreds of houses.

That makes me realize that anyone can delete a single segment with house numbers and when someone tries to add the road segment back, the house numbers are gone? This could be a very big problem for vandalism beyond just losing the street segment itself which is frankly pretty easy to replace.

This would be solved it the house numbers were somehow attached to a location and street name in the database and if a segment gets added to the map with that same name, then the house number automatically gets reattached to that segment to the closest location on that road. It would not be 100%, but would save probably 95% of the work after a major error.

[kentsmith9]

Split Roads

Do we want to simply say if a road is split be sure to add only house numbers on the side of the street accessible to those drivers? I think it is simple enough to say and understand.

Also split roads have the added complexity of people unsplitting them and losing the house number data on one side of the street (depending upon which segments are kept). I wonder if we need to propose a feature to "merge segments" to retain house numbers and other road details.

[kentsmith9]

FORCE - Limitation by editor level

There seems to be editors that cannot force as noted here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=44646
If so, the wiki should include the information.

For the Wiki here http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/Hous ... rs#Forcing can someone confirm the actual limitation? Is there a minimum editor level? I think it should be easy enough to add once we have the info.

[kentsmith9]

I just saw another thread that mentioned they could not find info on house numbering for split roads. We should probably add that to http://www.waze.com/wiki/index.php/House_Numbers_in_WME.

If someone does not get to it before I return from Costa Rica in a week I will take a stab at it, but we probably want to discuss it here first.

[kentsmith9]

It was pointed out in another thread that we should determine when the FAQ for Missing House Addresses should be updated. I think it currently needs a mix of active and not yet active answers. Maybe we can split them up or at least update it to the current status of House Numbering.

[kentsmith9]

By the way, I'll be glad when in the next upgrade developers figure out a way to put the stop point somewhere other than right in front. Many destinations have driveways off another street. Until then, there's no real way to improve search results for these places from what the third-party services provide.

I have seen some of the conversations around that and it appears doable, but no idea how far down the line .

[kentsmith9]

If you can, try what I described to be sure your theory is correct.

1. Search for some non-existent address on a street that uses the prefix system and include both the prefix and suffix with the dash.
2. Note what location is provided.
3. Try the same thing again with only the suffix of the non-existent address.
4. Try to search for an existing address with only the suffix of the address.
5. Now add the non-existent address on the road.
6. Assuming addresses are going to be searchable after a few days (assuming it is not disabled for some time still), search for the same items as above and note if any results are different than the first search of each.

This should tell us enough about what to do for the missing dashes in Hawaii at least.

[kentsmith9]

I am not sure the new addresses are being searched yet. Is it possible the address came from one of the other search providers? Maybe you can do a test and create an address with just the suffix on a road near you and see if (after a few days) the data is searchable in the client. Part of that test should include searching for the "test address" before you add it to see how it behaves. Then if it acts differently we know your test was successful (or proved the failure).