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CDPs

Post by Riamus
I haven't seen any discussion on CDPs for Michigan, so I wanted to bring them up. Some states will include them and others will not. For those who may not know what a CDP is, it stands for a Census Designated Place. Basically, it's an area that is given a name for census purposes, but is not really an official town or city. According to Wikipedia, there are 96 in Michigan. I don't really suggest adding them all as some are not really used and some may be within city limits. I also don't suggest adding the ones that are for the entire township. But there are some small communities that are basically a small town or village and are well known. I think it makes sense to include those. What does everyone else think?
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Post by davielde
After looking at the list of CDPs as it appears on Wikipedia, I believe that most in the larger metro areas of Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing are significant enough to be included. More distinct rural/semi-rural areas should also receive a separate designation.

Doing a few quick searches, most if not all of the CDPs at least in the southern lower peninsula are already designated on the Waze map--even if that designation is not commonly referred to in the area. Many are major communities or suburbs, and others are not in common use, mostly because they may not be served by a post office with the same name. With that in mind, I would say ideally only include them if they have at least one official zip code where the post office uses the same name as the CDP.

CDPs around major metros like Detroit (including Oakland, Macomb counties) are readily identifiable as major or minor (albeit unincorporated) communities: Harrison Twp, Clinton Twp, Shelby Charter Twp (although it's just shortened locally to Shelby Twp), Redford, etc. Lansing has Okemos, Holt, etc. Grand Rapids has Allendale, Jenison, Comstock Park, Byron Center, etc. Even Jackson has *cough* "suburbs" such as Spring Arbor, Napoleon, and Michigan Center that no one locally would classify as Jackson. These CDPs all happen to have postal names that correspond with the CDP name as well.

Rural CDPs would be similar but for the opposite reason--they have a post office but cannot be served by any larger neighboring population. Places like Indian River and Mio are well known even if they are little (and even if just because they are mentioned on signs on I-75). They could easily incorporate but haven't.

The "grey area" seems to surround mid-size cities such as Kalamazoo. I actually grew up in Kalamazoo near the Eastwood CDP, and my parents still have the same house there. "Eastwood, MI" appears on the Waze map. In local use, Eastwood is just a neighborhood or part of the "east side" of Kalamazoo Twp. It is served by one "Kalamazoo" post office and is no different from other areas of Kzoo such as Milwood, Westwood, etc. Milwood is not a CDP, but Eastwood and Westwood are. Wikipedia even says "The area defined as the CDP may not correspond exactly with local understanding of the Eastwood neighborhood. The CDP may include nearby areas that locals would not necessarily identify as Eastwood." A similar sentence appears in the entry for Westwood. In cases like this, it may be really confusing to direct someone to Eastwood, MI or Westwood, MI because everyone says they live in Kalamazoo Twp or just Kalamazoo--mostly because that's what they see on their mail, or that's the entity to whom they send their local taxes. Another example from around Kalamazoo is "South Gull Lake", where everyone would simply refer to it as Gull Lake, which matches the name of the high school and all local services. Finally, there is a CDP for "Comstock Northwest", which is distinct from Comstock, the actual unincorporated community. Having never heard of the former designation before this morning, I would just get directions or send mail to "Comstock" instead since as with other CDPs in this grey area, Comstock Northwest does not have a separate post office. Of course, maybe this is just an historical problem with how Kzoo has handled their post offices, and the rest of the state isn't as screwed up... ;)
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Post by davielde
I think that with a few exceptions, it is safe to remove "Township" or "Twp" from the city name. Do some research first though so as not to conflict with other parts of the state. Much of Washtenaw and Livingston counties where I drive just have the first part of the township name listed. The exceptions are where people readily identify with a township (i.e. "Hamburg Twp" is distinct from the tiny village of "Hamburg" in the township where I live) or where omitting the township name would direct people to a city that is not located within the township (i.e. we still have "Marion Township" on our maps in Livingston because Marion is a distinct village up near Cadillac). I think that in the Kalamazoo area, shortening to Prairie Ronde, Texas, Alamo, etc. would at least be consistent with what appears elsewhere in the southern LP.

As for "Greater [...] Area", it is ridiculous in many cases. Segments were imported that way into the base map, but it's just a catch-all for no-man's land. There are still a few areas with that designation over in the Detroit area, but it's all rural area that no one has cleaned up yet, likely because few editors have driven within range or have made it a priority. In general, the Greater designation is being shortened to the township name in the Detroit area.
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Post by davielde
For townships, I just saw this thread in the Michigan forum: viewtopic.php?f=630&t=59026
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Post by miked_64
Very good discussion. I agree that Westwood/Eastwood should probably be changed to Kalamazoo despite being CDPs. Same goes for South Gull Lake.

I'd like to jump in with a slightly off topic question about how to handle townships. Many of the Township areas in Kzoo county are shown in Waze and appear in the client and Live Map. However, no one would say I'm from Prairie Ronde Township. They would say i'm from such and such a town/village. Having both the township name and the town/village name clutters up the map.

There are a couple of townships where the roads do not bear the township name, and the map appears far less cluttered.

There are also a couple of Townships that are listed as Greater XX Area, where XX is the township name. It's safe to say that no one refers to these areas as "Greater". It's just plain confusing.

I propose removing the township name for all roads in unincorporated areas of townships. For CDPs, if they are attached to a larger city, then call them that city name. If a CDP stands alone, then yes call them out. Does that make sense?
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Post by miked_64
I experimented with changing Westwood to Kalamazoo from Drake Rd to Nichols Rd and from Ravine Rd to Main St. I'll check how it looks in the Live Map and client in a couple of days once it's updated.

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Post by miked_64
So it might be beside the point, but why is the city layer not related to the city name in the street? What purpose does each of them serve, or are they redundant? Just curious...
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Post by Riamus
I agree with your thoughts as well. You mentioned Indian River and I believe that's a very good example. I grew up in northern Michigan and until today, I didn't know that Indian River wasn't an official town. It certainly seems like one and I think it deserves to be treated as one.

It is true that many of these are already on the map, but not all are. for example, I added Eastport myself. It was my opinion that it should show up on the map. But after doing so, I decided I should probably see what others thought about CDPs. I certainly don't think every single one needs to be added and even some that are already there could probably be removed. But there are definitely ones that make sense to me.
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Post by Riamus
miked_64 wrote:I'd like to jump in with a slightly off topic question about how to handle townships. Many of the Township areas in Kzoo county are shown in Waze and appear in the client and Live Map. However, no one would say I'm from Prairie Ronde Township. They would say i'm from such and such a town/village. Having both the township name and the town/village name clutters up the map.

There are a couple of townships where the roads do not bear the township name, and the map appears far less cluttered.

There are also a couple of Townships that are listed as Greater XX Area, where XX is the township name. It's safe to say that no one refers to these areas as "Greater". It's just plain confusing.

I propose removing the township name for all roads in unincorporated areas of townships. For CDPs, if they are attached to a larger city, then call them that city name. If a CDP stands alone, then yes call them out. Does that make sense?
Although I haven't seen a lot of discussion on removal of townships, that does seem to be what most people seem to want to do. Myself included. Main charter townships should of course stay, but a LOT of the townships are never spoken of and many locals may not even know what township they live in. When I lived in northern Michigan, I probably only heard the township name a couple of times in school and never anywhere else. And I lived in the area for 15-20 years. I don't like how the map looks like a quilt with townships across almost the entire state. You can't very easily see where the cities and towns are and some of those townships cover up the cities so you can't see the city boundaries at all. It's just a mess. The "greater area" ones can definitely be removed. I haven't seen anyone say they wanted those to stay. The townships probably need more discussion before removing them, or at least agreement from some of the Champs and level 5+ editors in Michigan.

For any township that remains, it should be named X Twp. It should not be just X and should not be X Township. Right now, most townships are just written as X and this is causing problems when there are towns or cities with the same name. If the township needs to be there, mark it as X Twp so it's clear that you're looking at a township and not a city.

As far as removing townships or greater areas, just removing them from the roads will not remove them from the map in most cases. If the township is in the city layer itself, we can't do anything to change that layer other than request that Waze make the changes. There is a thread already for removing or fixing cities, towns, and townships in Michigan. But I haven't seen any of the ones mentioned there get fixed yet. It's a long process to get any of those fixed up, unfortunately.
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Post by Riamus
Regarding the options for duplicate city names, I like the first option better. There aren't going to be many duplicates and seeing every city appear as City (County) just looks really bad, imo. If the number of duplicates was significant, then I might think differently.

As far as removing townships that aren't needed, we can remove them from streets, but that won't remove them from the map because they are part of the city layer. There is a thread in the forum for cities to update/remove/whatever that supposedly would pass on the names to Waze to get fixed on the city layer. I'm not sure that anything is being done with the locations listed in that thread. I think we would be best served to try and get all of those locations to Waze and get them to update the city layer for them. At the same time, I would ask them to do a database removal and/or update of the townships that we want removed or changed. Rather than trying to changes hundreds of thousands of segments to remove township names or change them to X Twp or X Township, they can do a quick replacement in the database for all matches within the state. It's a matter of less than 5 minutes to set it up and and seconds to add each township that needs fixed or removed. It may be low priority on their end, but if we can try and push it, they may look into it for us and save us a LOT of work.
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