Lake Oswego has dropped the "SW" directional prefix from their road names

[Peter Dobratz]

As I edit in Lake Oswego, I have been removing the "Southwest" directional prefix from road names and also making the value of addr:street for the addresses along the road match the road name.  It appears that there's a coordinated effort to repeatedly copy RLIS road names into OSM overwriting what's there, thus undoing many of my changes.

OSM usernames are cwilley106, "Meredith Rider", Brett_Ham

Does anyone know who is coordinating this effort?  None of the above users have any information on their OSM profile page.

I think this is the actual Lake Oswego law:

http://www.codepublishing.com/or/lakeoswego/mobile/?pg=LakeOswego45/LakeOswego4517.html

Oddly, they consider "North State Street" and "South State Street" to be the only street with a directional prefix, but mention "North Shore Road" in the same sentence.  Maybe the "North" in "North Shore" is not officially considered a directional prefix.  In practice, this law means that street signs with "SW" are being replaced with signs without the "SW"

Thanks,

Peter

[Darrell Fuhriman]

It seems that at the very least they should be left as alternate names. If people are actually using those street names colloquially — especially for routing — then they should be kept. Doubly so if they are still on (some) street signs. 

Maybe you have a few examples we could look at?

d. 

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[Cone, Paul]

That code just mentions addresses – doesn’t say anything about street naming.  I searched for that but couldn’t find anything.  (For reference, the City of Portland street naming code is here.)

 

I don’t think this is a new thing.  If you look at the RLIS data you will see that some of the segments that don’t carry the prefix haven’t been modified since 2008, or earlier.

 

And make sure to pay attention to the fact that Clackamas County still carries the prefix, so along the City of Lake Oswego boundary you will see where the road name will not carry the prefix, then carry it, then not carry it again. 

 

Paul

 

-------------------------------------------

Paul Cone

Corporate GIS

Bureau of Technology Services

City of Portland, Oregon

paul...@portlandoregon.gov

(503) 823-4071

[Alan Millar]

I think the name difference is indeed about the prefix.  "State Street" has a north section, but it isn't "Shore Road" with a north section.

That code says that ordinance went in in 1996.  I wonder why the push now to remove the prefixes? Just curious!

- Alan

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[Madeline Steele]

Hello all, 

Brett and Meredith are TriMet employees who have been adding sidewalk tags and service streets in the Metro area. They've also been doing some incidental cleanup (e.g., removing old TIGER tags), and these prefix changes were a part of that effort.

Apologies for not checking with you all regarding proper prefix standards for Lake Oswego before beginning this work! We were unaware that Lake Oswego had this ordnance, and will happily fix this. I looks like most of the Lake Oswego streets in RLIS don't have prefixes - we can rely on RLIS as an authority on this issue, right?

Also, I will ask them to put more information up on the OSM user profiles soon.

On an unrelated note, are you all aware of the upcoming renaming of 150 streets in Hillsboro?

http://katu.com/news/local/150-street-names-could-change-in-hillsboro

Happy holidays,

Madeline

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[Cone, Paul]

RLIS is maintained collectively by the authoritative agencies for those areas.

 

Paul

 

From: osm...@googlegroups.com [mailto:osm...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Madeline Steele
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2016 9:41 AM
To: osm...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Lake Oswego has dropped the "SW" directional prefix from their road names

 

Hello all, 

 

Brett and Meredith are TriMet employees who have been adding sidewalk tags and service streets in the Metro area. They've also been doing some incidental cleanup (e.g., removing old TIGER tags), and these prefix changes were a part of that effort.

 

Apologies for not checking with you all regarding proper prefix standards for Lake Oswego before beginning this work! We were unaware that Lake Oswego had this ordnance, and will happily fix this. I looks like most of the Lake Oswego streets in RLIS don't have prefixes - we can rely on RLIS as an authority on this issue, right?

 

Also, I will ask them to put more information up on the OSM user profiles soon.

 

On an unrelated note, are you all aware of the upcoming renaming of 150 streets in Hillsboro?

 

http://katu.com/news/local/150-street-names-could-change-in-hillsboro

 

Happy holidays,

 

Madeline

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 8:34 AM, 'Alan Millar' via OSM PDX <osm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I think the name difference is indeed about the prefix.  "State Street" has a north section, but it isn't "Shore Road" with a north section.

 

That code says that ordinance went in in 1996.  I wonder why the push now to remove the prefixes? Just curious!

- Alan

On Dec 23, 2016, at 12:17 AM, Peter Dobratz <pe...@dobratz.us> wrote:

As I edit in Lake Oswego, I have been removing the "Southwest" directional prefix from road names and also making the value of addr:street for the addresses along the road match the road name.  It appears that there's a coordinated effort to repeatedly copy RLIS road names into OSM overwriting what's there, thus undoing many of my changes.

OSM usernames are cwilley106, "Meredith Rider", Brett_Ham

Does anyone know who is coordinating this effort?  None of the above users have any information on their OSM profile page.

 

I think this is the actual Lake Oswego law:

http://www.codepublishing.com/or/lakeoswego/mobile/?pg=LakeOswego45/LakeOswego4517.html

Oddly, they consider "North State Street" and "South State Street" to be the only street with a directional prefix, but mention "North Shore Road" in the same sentence.  Maybe the "North" in "North Shore" is not officially considered a directional prefix.  In practice, this law means that street signs with "SW" are being replaced with signs without the "SW"

 

Thanks,

Peter

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[Peter Dobratz]

Due to the Terwilliger closure and my family's desire to collect Pokémon, I was able to observe a number of street signs in Lake Oswego.  The vast majority of streets signs within the city limits of Lake Oswego don't have the SW prefix.  I think it makes sense to omit the SW in the name tag on the roads and also on the addr:street tag, but also include an alt_name tag on the road with "Southwest " included.

While driving from Portland down SW Boones Ferry Road, I did see signs for Boones Ferry Road in Lake Owego both with and without the SW.  Country Club Road also has signs both with and with the SW.  The signs at the corner of Monroe Parkway and Boones Ferry Road, both have the SW prefix.  If you look at the websites of the shops in the Oswego Towne Square shopping center, the majority of them omit the SW prefix for addresses on Monroe Parkway.  If you type in any of these addresses into the the USPS zip code lookup site using the SW prefix, the formatted address returned will have the SW prefix omitted.

In downtown Lake Oswego, I did not see any signs with the SW prefix.  I did notice that all of the numbered streets are written out: "Fourth St" not "4th St".  I think the general consensus is to use the numbers in OSM "4th Street".

At the corner of North Shore Rd and North State Street, the sign shows "N State St" and "North Shore Rd".  There's also an apartment building there with "Northshore Rd" on the sign.  If you do a USPS zip code lookup of an address on North Shore Rd, the USPS will reformat it as one word "Northshore" as well.  The street sign clearly has a space between "North" and "Shore", but I wouldn't be surprised if "Northshore" was created simply to indicate that "North" is not meant to be a directional prefix in this case.  Based on this, I think it makes sense to add "alt_name=Northshore Road" in this case.

On the Lake Oswego GIS site, you can see that roads within the city limits do not have the SW prefix, but roads in adjacent areas in Portland and in unincorporated areas of Clackamas County do have the SW prefix:

http://gis.ci.oswego.or.us/public/flexmap/flexmap.html

PortlandMaps shows similar:

https://www.portlandmaps.com/

I'm in the process of cleaning up some of the addresses that were imported with the building footprints.  I noticed some addresses with "addr:city=Lake Oswego" and addr:postcode=97062.  According to the USPS, this is an invalid combination.  97062 is Tualatin and Lake Oswego should be either 97034 or 97035.  Ideally, the value in the addr:street tag should match the value in the name tag for the corresponding road in OSM.

The primary source of road names in OSM is supposed to be the road signs, but road signs are not always consistent and not always correct.

Peter

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[Madeline Steele]

Thank you for looking into this and actually checking out the signs in person, Peter!

It sounds like RLIS matches what you saw on the ground and can be used as a reference when straightening this out. In this screen cap, Lake Oswego is gray, streets with prefixes are blue, and streets without them are red. Does this seem to conform with what you saw, Peter? Does anyone else have any concerns with using RLIS as the authority here? Note that in the areas where the boundary is fragmented, the alternating segments are very short.

Thanks,

Madeline

[Peter Dobratz]

As far as I know that looks right.  For many of these roads, especially where they cross in and out of the city limits, it makes sense to use both name and alt_name to capture the name with and without the "Southwest" prefix.  It may also make sense to look at the OSM history (and RLIS history if available) and retain the road with "Southwest" as an alt_name if it was ever listed as the street name.

Peter