Nomenclature
Waze uses the term City, but that leads to confusion in discussions because the word has multiple meanings in the Australian context. It could be:
- a large metropolitan area containing dozens of suburbs, as in Brisbane City Council
- the CBD of a metropolitan area - Rockhampton City
- the name of a "suburb" in the ACT - "City"
This discussion uses the term "suburb", as that is the commonly used term - with the understanding that terms such as locality, division or district might be used in some areas. In general, suburbs (by whatever name) are official bounded areas used in the address of a property. They are used in Waze for:
- labelling an area in the app and in the WME
- (sometimes) in the announcement of a route: "Let's take B83 - Pacific Highway, Hornsby"
- (sometimes) in address search results
To reduce confusion, it is desirable that a consistent name is used for each suburb, and the conventional way to achieve this is to use the official name provided by the State or Territory Government for the area.
Dealing with duplicate names in the same State
The early attempt to distinguish between two suburb names in the same State by adding the State to one but not the other proved to be of limited value. It fails badly in the roughly 300 cases when there are more than two such suburbs. It has been suggested that the Local Government Area be used as a qualifier, but LGAs have long names that would clutter the map, and some suburbs extend over several LGAs. The PSMA data uses a field described as "A unique four digit identifier required to differentiate localities of the same name within a state. It is not consistent with the postcodes used by Australia Post." This identifier is what we now use.
In some cases one suburb in a state is far more prominent than others with the same name in that state. For example, Gilberton, Qld is the current name for a suburb on the Gold Coast. There is also a Gilberton in a remote area west of Townsville which has no name or features on the Waze map. There seems little point in cluttering up the name of the populated Gilberton to avoid conflict with the unmapped one. State managers and prominent editors in each State may request that we omit the numeric identifier for the most prominent one. As a guideline: count the segments in each suburb. If one suburb has at least 50% and 20 segments more than every other, it doesn't need the numeric identifier. Otherwise everyone gets the identifier.
References to Australia Post site
The conditions of use of the Australia Post website require you to get permission from Australia Post before establishing a link to their website - see site-which-must-not-be-named/about-us/about-our-site/website-terms-conditions#websitecontentaccess. Apparently they're still living in the 1980s, hoping this new-fangled Internet thing will go away. The use of the PSMA identifier instead of postcodes avoids the need for us to link to the Australia Post site.
Suburbs across State boundaries
Some suburbs appear to cross a State boundary. Examples: Mingoola, Mungindi, Bonshaw, Hungerford, Barrington, Texas and Cottonvale each have a Qld part and an NSW part. Other "split" suburbs are Speewa in NSW & Vic, Jerrabomberra in ACT & NSW, Tanami in NT & WA, Nicholson in NT & Qld. and Jervis Bay in NSW and "Other Territories". There seems to be no particular advantage to treating each pair as a single suburb or as two suburbs.
Usage in the ACT
The Australian Capital Territory is divided into 19 Districts which cover the entire Territory. There are also 119 Divisions which cover the populated areas, but only cover 15% of the total area. Some Districts contain no Divisions, and some Districts contain Divisions but also have areas that are not in any Division. Most addresses use the Division name, so Divisions are what most people would recognise as suburbs. ACT locations that are not in any Division usually use the District name. After discussion in the forums, this convention has been adopted. The List of Australian Duplicate Cities at Australian_Duplicate_Cities assumes this mixture of Divisions and Districts. (Even government and semi-government departments seem to use variations of this for their addresses. The CSIRO Black Mountain site (https://www.csiro.au/en/Locations/ACT/Black-Mountain) publicises its address as "Clunies Ross Street, Black Mountain ACT". Black Mountain is neither a Division nor a District. The National Arboretum (https://www.nationalarboretum.act.gov.au/visit/getting-here_ gives its address as "Forest Drive, off Tuggeranong Parkway, Weston Creek ACT". It's actually in Molonglo Valley.)
Non-compliant City Names
Many cities in Waze did not originally have the official names for their CBD. This applies to Brisbane, Rockhampton, Townsville, Cairns, Charters Towers, Mount Isa, Toowoomba, Palmerston, and Darwin, each of which should have included the word "City". After discussion in the forums at https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=260056 we brought the Waze map into compliance with the Wiki (as opposed to making an exception for these names). Canberra is a special case - the official name for the CBD is simply "City", but that would lead to real confusion. It's currently called "Canberra"; "Canberra City" might be a better choice.
Name Variations
The main article refers to using the official name "without abbreviations". This is to avoid names like "Stroud Road" being abbreviated to "Stroud Rd". Also applies to "Mount xxxx" and "yyyy Heights".
Some information on this page derived from Administrative Boundaries ©PSMA Australia Limited licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).