On 03/02/2008 09:47, John McKerrell wrote: > I haven't been paying attention to this so I'm not trying to pass > judgement here, the claim about "most towns, at least don't have more > than one street of any name" piqued my interest though. I just > checked, there's 15 Church Roads in Liverpool, 4 High Streets and 5-7 > Station Roads. Just thought you might be interested in those stats > (found using the Multimap geocoder, unfortunately I haven't got > anything like all of those mapped).
That's true, but Liverpool is a big city which has suburbs. The name finder will tell you that it is High Street, near Olive Mount near Liverpool, which nearly always works(*). (Unfortunately Tom's presentation of the results on the OSM home page suppresses quite a lot of the context information that the namefinder supplies, so you don't get to see this, but you do if you do it from www.frankieandshadow.com/osm) However, this is more than a problem of searching - it's more fundamental IMO - a problem for all users of the map, both in visual form and routing. It is particularly 'High Street' in the UK though there are others - Church Street/Road as John says, and Station Road are others. If I find this situation in neighbouring villages (suburbs, boroughs...) I always disambiguate them, which helps the name finder, people looking at the map and so on. So take the road which runs between Swavesey and Over in Cambridgeshire (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.30784&lon=0.01034&zoom=15&layers=B0FT). It starts out Station Road in Swavesey, turns into Over Road after crossing the now disused railway line (**) and then becomes Station Road as it enters Over. So I've put "Station Road (Swavesey)" and "Station Road (Over)" on the map. This is different from Eccles Road: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.32364&lon=-1.96072&zoom=15&layers=B0FT which runs from the centre of one town, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire to the centre of another, Whaley Bridge, a distance of about 6km. Unlike the Station Road's above the road is not two separate Eccles Roads in two towns, but (somewhat unusually) a road which maintains its name between settlements. David (*) if they are closer than 3km it doesn't because they won't be recorded separately unless they are disambiguated in the name. http://www.frankieandshadow.com/osm/?find=Church+Road%2C+Liverpool gives Church Road, Walton-on-the-Hill; Church Road, Egerton Park; Church Road, Olive Mount (twice); Church Road, Waterloo; Church Road, Wavertree Nook; and more... (**) which will soon become the highway=bus_guideway we've discussed here before. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev