Spoiler: I have found almost 2000 of those streets in my hometown alone, and many cities with similar cases.
Some street names are so popular that they have ben given several times within the city limits.
Typically, it happens when smaller independent cities are re-grouped into a bigger city at some point, a general tendency in the public administration of different countries (in Europe - I don’t know the situation overseas).
This issue has been discussed in the past but not in the idea category:
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2 streets with the same name (where it is argued by several members that the issue is of minor importance)
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Road completed - #18 by petje (actually with one solution to this problem pointed out by @petje)
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Same road name in two cities show up as the same road in Citystrides - #2 by nicola.armstrong (in the later part of the thread that began on another topic)
There are different downsides to the current method for street recognition in CS:
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striders don’t get credit for all the streets they have run. Here a personal example with 19 streets named the same: Rosenweg in Berlin, Berlin - CityStrides (ignoring the fact that some of them are not regarded as real streets by city authorities, but that is another issue)
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the non-counted completed streets are a bias for the monthly challenges (Challenges - CityStrides)
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the node hunter does not work anymore for some streets that have not been run at all. A personal example: Friedenstraße in Berlin, Berlin - CityStrides. As of today, there are 2 streets I have never seen in my life, but the node hunter says I have already completed the Friedenstraße because the 4 completed streets with the same name already account for 90% of the 180 nodes.
Because of the last point, I really hope that the popular hard mode idea (User Setting: Hard Mode) will be implemented at least optionally at some point, but the 2 ideas are independent, and I think the situation described here is not as rare as some may believe.
I have computed some provisional numbers for the city of Berlin (where I am only halfway, so I will certainly discover a few more of those streets):
Up to now, I have found 628 street names that are shared by 1873 different streets.
Conversely, it means that at least 1245 ways in OSM are missing from CS street counts just in Berlin.
This is my experience. Are you sure the same name problematic does not affect your city or a city you will visit soon? Even if not, don’t you think the described flaw should be solved?
Street names are the most usual way to define streets and it should stay like this for users in CS, but in the background, streets should be defined by their extremities additionally so that each of them remains identifiable and unique.
