To me, what makes an unicorporated name more relevant than the municipal has the do with the zip code. All carriers (ups/fedex/etc) rely on the USPS data. This aligns well to established CDPs like somerset in franklin twp but do think this is a national discussion much like the road type/FC update.
Local usage is the arbiter. If you run SV down a main street, and find the websites for a bunch of stores using a name, that’s the local name. A single UR should make you want to look or ask more questions. If the responder makes a good case (in back and forth conversation) or there is other data to back up the position, then that’s satisfactory.
USPS lookup can contribute, but shouldn’t be the single arbiter either.
Even though this is a NJ discussion, I will use New York City as an example, because it is a very good illustration of what can go wrong if you rely entirely on city/town/village incorporated names. Note that there are no CDPs at all in NYC, just the borough or county names are used (which are always in conflict, except for the Bronx… and technically Queens, too, though it is irrelevant there for the ost part as we shall see).
In much of NYC, the borough name is the “city” name for all purposes. Brooklyn, Bronx (or The Bronx) are the incorporated county name, USPS name, and the name that locals call it. There’s not much conflict for naming for those two boroughs, other than the funkiness of “The.” Informally, “The” is always used, but it is recognizable either way, and when writing practically (including addresses), it is typically left off anyway. Locals may use a neighborhood for self-identification only (and sometimes those neighborhood names are in conflict, such as Flatbush/Midwood and a host of others). Brooklyn is technically Kings County, not Brooklyn County, but you own’t find that on anything but some letterhead.
Manhattan has a bit of a dual identity. The county is “New York,” while the borough is “Manhattan,” and both are heavily used in different contexts. USPS has either “New York” or “Manhattan” as acceptable, but “New York” is preferred. Residents will also go both ways – interestingly, outside Manhattan, NYC residents refer to Manhattan as “The City,” almost universally, and residents will say so “The City” to locals, “New York” to out of towners if they don’t think the person needs/cares about the exact location, or “Manhattan” if the out of towner needs more specific information. In Waze, we use “Manhattan” because “New York” is deemed too ambiguous. Drivers searching for an address will rarely use “Manhattan,” so what we have is a mismatch for searches, a mismatch for official naming (even though that’s the borough name), and not what you would find in an address for anyone in the area. Nevertheless, that’s the choice we made, and it isn’t changing.
The borough of Staten Island is officially Richmond County, but nobody uses that in addressing or searches. Even USPS uses Staten Island. So we use it too. It doesn’t match the official incorporated name of the county, and the borough name to the best of my research is not “incorporated” because there is no functioning level of state-recognized government. (Historically, Henry Hudson named it Staten Island, and it developed several villages over the next hundred plus years; the village of Richmond was where the government offices were located at the time it became a county, and that’s what the county was called. At the end of the 19th century, it became part of NYC, with the borough named Richmond, which didn’t change until about 40 years ago.)
That leaves Queens. Oh boy. Queens’ former villages still retain a strong identity today. Its major villages are still the primary names used for addressing by USPS, such as Flushing, and Forest Hills. There are local neighborhoods names that are not used this way – for example, Flushing includes a whole bunch of large, well-known local neighborhoods whose names (“Kew Gardens Hills”) are only used by residents for self-identification, but would never be used for addressing. Nevertheless, every place in Queens has a dual identity of “Queens” and “local village name.” For simplicity, we have adopted Queens for the entire borough as the name.
I believe all the county names and the city name were included in state charters, which make them incorporated. When I checked, it looked like the boroughs are not separately incorporated. It creates a mess, because the notion of cities-within-counties is upside down in NYC, boroughs are coterminous with counties but rarely share a name, and village, borough, and county name are have dominance in some area or other. USPS is not consistent in the selection of name type for that reason – whatever is the dominant usage in a place, that’s what they use.
And that’s the point. Whatever is dominant in local usage, we use in Waze, too. COnflicting street names? Go with local usage. Conflicting locality names? That’s what we’re discussing, and ditto.
Usually, there is not a dominant name conflict between local usage and incorporated municipality name in NJ (or NY either, for that matter). Unless we know of one, we can go with incorporated name.
(By the way, the dropping of “Township” is also fairly consistent with the dominant usage theory, even if we did it for other reasons.)
Holy crap…lots to read.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to know a history buff 
Ok, so as the devil’s advocate, the last time we had this discussion, the dominant concern was that using any name other than an officially chartered/incorporated municipal name (where one was available) provided for too-soft of a boundary for the polygons Waze generates based on what is input for roads’ primary street names. We considered the conflicts this would cause in many townships (or towns in New York) and decided it was more important to maintain the polygon consistency with hard municipal boundaries, not just in NJ, but also at least several other states that use rural and suburban townships.
From what I’m hearing now, it sounds like all of those states, except NJ it seems, have changed to local unincorporated names superseding township names, as least where the post office agrees. Somehow, I missed this transition and the announcement for it, or maybe it was just done state by state or whatever. Doesn’t really matter.
New Jersey’s townships are not different from any other state that uses townships (towns in NY - but same concept), and for that reason we should strongly consider what everyone else is doing with townships, especially if we’re still trying to move toward an overall unified US policy.
The wiki can easily be updated to reflect whatever the national standard (or even majority of states with townships) are doing and/or have done. But before doing so, we should probably also talk about whether to go by an objective standard, like officially accepted post office names only, or whether to accept anything colloquially referenced on URs and such. The latter approach is definitely more local-community friendly, but also has the potential to create conflicts within the state if the same name is used in two different places within the state.
IMnsHO, city names accepted by the post office reflect local names enough to prevent confusion among the overwhelming majority of Wazers. However, to me the biggest benefit of using post-office-accepted city names is that they are already pre-screened by the post office for uniqueness within the state, so it would make township naming conflicts (and the total-hack workarounds we’ve developed for that) go away, as we’d just use the name the post office accepts for addresses on that particular road.
Any thoughts?
In NJ, this could easily mean that a lot of, like gated communities, especially out on the edges of the suburbs would likely get their own primary city name. While that in itself is not necessarily bad, what would we do when a particular community name causes a naming conflict in Waze because another community in the same state has the same name that people commonly know the are a by? We should definitely have an objective guideline for that, or else two editors who find each other’s solutions to be weird will just keep back and forth editing.
Post office accepted names are used for mailing addresses everywhere, at least in NJ (I don’t think there are any rural routes here), and their city names are already pre-screened for uniqueness within the state, making any potential conflicts non-existent. I, at least, would think some one would have to make a really, really, strong case for deviating from a post-office-accepted name.
This makes sense particularly for the helping with city smudging/conflicts. I would think this would be more transparent to a novice user to see their postal code represented even if it’s not an incorporated town.
The one area of caution I see (and there may be many more) is when we have statewide updates such as the FC update. The maps provided only show the incorporated place so we need to be clear about why we refer to postal codes when applicable or incorporated twp, etc.
The Arizona DOT (ADOT) has a Gis map that displays city boundaries when loaded. This is specifically true for Maricopa County. ADOT gathered that information from the Maricopa County Assessors office and state data.
Does NJ have any official gov generated/controlled map that displays this? That would help bring it one step closer to an answer. If not at the state level, then the county level maybe?
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We do have GIS maps by county, issued by NJDOT, that include many unincorporated place names - not just towns - but my biggest issue with this is that it doesn’t make clear what the extent/boundary of any of these name are.
Sorry PhantomSoul, a national standard just won’t work. There are way too many variations state to state to even try to make a national standard. Give up that crusade.
A little of my philosophy. Start with the basic principles. Why do we look at a map? We want to know:
-when in unfamiliar territory, where are we?
-where is the place we want to go?
-how do we get there?
In my humble opinion, the city polygon layer is there to answer the first question only. Question two can only be answered effectively using address databases maintained by waze, google and any other consolidators of geodata. For any given location, there can be as many as 4-5 “place” names that can be applied and searched for. We can’t even approach the breadth and depth of of their collection powers from behind our keyboards. The data is also ever changing, and my preference is that we editors spend our time on work that lasts a long time. Of course answer three is what we all help to do every day when we make the Waze map the best representation of roads in the world.
Thus, when I try to fix the city polygons, I’m only trying to help the Waze users who follow me answer question one. If it happens to improve the answers to question two, so be it. I’m glad to contribute.
It should be noted that USPS does not necessarily screen for duplicate names within a state. I can’t remember details offhand, but I recall reading about several conflicting localities in New York that the Post Office uses as primary names. Zip is crucial for those towns, and if you put the worng one in, better hope the street name is unique to one or the other.
Question: Is there a fairly simple city-naming guideline for townships that covers like 90% or more of the map accurately enough for our purposes? With any resolution to city naming in townships, I think its important to absolutely minimize the amount of arbitration having to be done by SMs or the RC, and any AM with an area in the state should be able to figure out why a particular primary city name was assigned without having to ask people why they did what they did.
I thinkthis document from NJ DoT can be used for just that purpose. It provides the local names, incorporate municipality and county.
That’s good.
It does have many conflicts though. In such a case though, I would imagine the most commonly known one gets to keep the name and the others have to revert to a postal or township name, whichever is more appropriate (Case study: check out zip code 08540 - Princeton, which spans parts of 4 different municipalities in 3 different counties)
That makes sense for conflicts starting with a possible priority being: most commonly known > adding suffix (Twp) > postal-identified CDP > other?
But how do we determine most commonly known? Franklin Twp for example has 4 conflicts. I would say the one in Somerset County would be most known, but that’s because of where I live and grew up.
I’m following this topic very closely. I’m trying to find a better answer to give you. Currently, I have few questions of my own to sort it out first. Routing and search are on top of my concerns to naming townships. Based on my discussion with few people, we may need “sub city level”
I’ll keep you posted.
A sub city level would be perfect if we could get it. It looks like Google actually does that already - try searching for Colonia, NJ and observe your results.
Great discussion all! Even though it seems we may have been a little late to the party. :oops:
It seems this topic is particularly complicated in NJ as it factually has the most conflicting names of any other state (Surprise!). Until we have a good solution in place as Orbit mentioned, it does seem like we all agree that a change to the wiki is in order.
Present text:
The sentence saying never to use CDP’s is erroneous and the entire section seems especially long.
Proposed Change:
Thoughts please?
Sounds good to me.
I would leave the paragraph about roads that straddle borders, or at the very least reduce the that thought down to a sentence or so.
More for the fire.
I am in this issue - again - due to a user issue, an address in Flanders (unincorporated) that is part of Mount Olive (incorporated).
https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=622&t=104468#p866717
This was similar to discussion brought here from the Martinsville(unincorporated)/Bridgewater(incorporated) thread
https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=622&t=102990#p858308
Gas on the fire - I grew up in Short HIlls (unincorporated) which is in Millburn (incorporated)
We follow Short Hills designation.
I hate to say this but there may be hundreds or examples of this same thing in Nj (Budd Lake also in Mount Olive for off the top of head example).
This is 4 examples in the less than a month I have been editing.
Sorry for the fuel.