General
In order not to break the KISS principle in the chapter Assigning and naming streets, we have provided additional information here for those who want to know more precisely why the municipality name is entered in the City field.
The question often arises why the place name, the cadastral municipality or, in the case of larger cities, names of districts are not entered in the city field. This is and has been discussed intensively again and again in the forum.
It is often argued that this is handled differently in other countries than in Austria.
It can be countered that, even if Waze is a transnational project, the individual countries have to decide for themselves how the country-specific structure should be shown in the map - that's why there is also a separate Austria Wiki.
For the functionality of the client, certain parameters must be taken into account; for example, when searching for addresses and calculating routes, each segment must be clearly addressable. Another parameter is that the number of segments should be as small as possible. Such background information is behind the justification of specifications in the wiki page, which are not specifically listed there due to the desired clarity. Further information related to this can also be found in the chapter How Waze calculates routes.
Street naming
If we were to fill the city field with the place name, ALL segments not located within place-name signs would be in a gigantic "No-City" and would then no longer be easily accessible. The community network is nice and close together, without gaps and still more finely structured than districts (in the country with district administration and such, not now the city districts) or even the federal states. It's just important for the way Waze finds the destinations in the background and calculates the route - there can't be this no man's land between the locations.
In Waze, the municipality name is currently the only way in Austria to reduce an area to the lowest denominator. Fields for towns or postcodes have long been eagerly awaited. Normally, however, a street name in a municipality is unique, even if it takes a lot of getting used to for many, which makes the street naming the necessary uniqueness. This also makes it clear that all segments of a street must have the same designation (spelling !!!) in order to be recognizable as a street for Waze (see routing page keyword grouping) and to minimize the time required for a route calculation.
Why no districts as City
The trunk road network has a special meaning for the route calculation in Waze.
The main argument for this is usually the traffic reports. For this, Waze uses other methods, which are described in more detail in the Routing chapter. The additional information value is only for those who are familiar with the area (who do not need a sat-nav at all); those who are not familiar with the area usually do not know the names of the districts anyway. For the purely visual assessment (where am I driving and where is the flag), the entire naming is not relevant.
For the route calculation, on the other hand, the recording of districts is counterproductive, since here not individual, but a large number of streets are separated by the district boundaries - so the streets and the entire network are again extremely segmented, which again leads to penalties in route calculation and grouping difficult by segments.
Special features of the trunk road network
The trunk road network has a special meaning for the route calculation in Waze.
In the case of motorways and expressways (freeways), the city field must be set to "No City", as these are unique within Austria and lead through many municipalities. If the municipality name was also entered here, the route calculation would be segmented at each municipality boundary. This leads to a whole bunch of completely useless fake junctions, hinders the grouping of the segments into a continuous street and lengthens the route calculation.
Motorways have to be seen as a kind of independent corridor that runs through a country.
