In your case the name (Congressman Ed Pastor Freeway) is quite different than 
the alt_name (South Mountain Freeway). I am not sure what the signage is on the 
ground (I won’t be driving through there for another few months) but this is 
what I’d expect the alt_name to be used for.

However it is located in Maricopa County (name=“Maricopa County” with 
alt_name=“Maricopa”) and that use of alt_name is what I find annoying.

To be up front, I had not noticed this naming practice in Arizona and 
California before I’d modified my topographic map rendering to combine the name 
and alt_name values into a form of “name value (alt_name value)” and seeing 
“Maricopa County (Maricopa)” on my map is what brought it to my attention. In 
your case “Congressman Ed Pastor Freeway (South Mountain Freeway)” would make 
perfect sense from the point of view of my rendering.

If the hive opinion is that having the alt_name value be a substring of the 
name value is okay then so be it. But my impression was that the alt_name was 
for cases like the South Mountain Freeway where the two names were 
significantly different.

Regarding keeping the alt_name in this case to assist searching is not an 
issue. For example if you search for “Columbia” on https:www.openstreetmap.org 
to find Columbia County in Washington State you will find many other Columbia 
Counties around the country, only the one in Florida has alt_name=Columbia set. 
Nominatim will return all of them despite the lack of an alt_name tag on most 
of them.

Cheers!
Tod

> On Dec 25, 2019, at 10:55 PM, Greg Morgan <dr.kludge...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Please don't remove the alt_name tags.  They are useful and not that much of 
> a distraction or an error  For example, a new freeway was just renamed for a 
> congress person that helped with many AZ transportation projects.  I added 
> the alt_name tag so that the South Mountain Freeway can still be found in a 
> search.  The new name is months old while the old alt_name has been used for 
> decade.  Not everyone calls Pima County by its full name.  That's why I think 
> that the mapper added the alt_name so that searches would be successful.
> 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/78850121 
> <https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/78850121>
> 
> On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 6:26 PM Tod Fitch <t...@fitchfamily.org 
> <mailto:t...@fitchfamily.org>> wrote:
> I’ve noticed that a number of counties in California and Arizona have what 
> seems to be unneeded alt_name tags in their boundary relations. For example 
> Pima County, Arizona has name=“Pima County” and alt_name=“Pima”. Same for 
> Pinal County in Arizona and Riverside, Orange, Kern and Ventura counties in 
> California. But this does not seem universal as the few counties I looked at 
> in Washington state have only a name=* tag (e.g. name=“Columbia County”).
> 
> I don’t see a wiki page for the standard for this in the United States. Is 
> there one I’ve missed?
> 
> Assuming there is not standard for this, should there be? And what should it 
> be? (My preference is to remove an alt_name that is simply the name without 
> “County”.)
> 
> For what it is worth, it looks like the alt_names for counties in Arizona and 
> California were added in 2014 by the user “revent” who is still actively 
> mapping borders around the world.
> 
> Thanks!
> Tod
> 
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