It looks like the nodes for New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada are nearly completely missing. As an example, 10th Avenue runs nearly the entire length of the city (over five kilometers) but CityStrides says there are only 5 nodes and it’s about 0.5 kilometers long. A large number of the streets are only one node, which is clearly wrong as well.
Oooooh I think I see what’s going on. There’s a “10th Avenue” and a “Tenth Avenue”, 10th Ave is about 0.5km and Tenth Ave is about 3.1km (there’s also an East Tenth Avenue for the remainder). Similarly, there’s a “Sixth Street” and a “6th Street”. Oh why can’t the OpenStreetMap be normalized?!?
Ah, yeah, that’ll do it.
It probably can be! There might be helpful guidance in Names - OpenStreetMap Wiki
In the case of 10th/Tenth, though, it doesn’t look like 10th is connected to Tenth … maybe they are separate streets? These two links zoom into the area in question:
I asked in the OpenStreetMap World Discord and I’m waiting on a response (I’ll update this if I get one).
It does seem to be a fairly local decision. NYC is heavily normalized around e.g. “18th Street” but if I search for “6th Street New Westminster” in Google, all the results are normalized around “Sixth Street”
Seems like a good opportunity to fix up some street names to me … I’ll edit if I hear back otherwise, though.
Update: This makes sense and pairs well with Ground truth … It was suggested:
I think most people go by the street sign and add the other to the
alt_nametag.
Still you’ll run into cases where street signs differ.
You can go by majority or even split the way if you really want to be exact.
I’ve had the street sign, official GIS and plot address names differ.
All on the same street.
The rule of thumb is if people are using it to navigate, you want it to match what they see on the ground to avoid confusion as much as possible.
For a lot of the streets that cross between Burnaby and New Westminster, it looks like some of the street names to change from numbered (in Burnaby) to spelled out (in New Westminster). I’ve confirmed this through Google Streetview, so strictly speaking OpenStreetMap is doing the right thing in going with what the street signs on the ground say, to prevent confusion.
For 10th/Tenth Avenue, this road is actually bisected by the border, but every sign I can find shows it as 10th Avenue. Annoyingly, when you get east of McBride Avenue, New Westminster switches to “E 10th Avenue” but Burnaby continues to call it “10th Avenue” on street signs.
At this point I’m really scared to go look at GIS for both of the cities because I’m sure they’re not consistent with what’s on street signs…
But I think I will go through and try to tidy up street names with what matches on street signs, although I’m not sure how to handle the split name for 10th Ave vs E. 10th Ave.
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