DRAFT
City names
- The approach roads to cities usually show the name on a sign with a white or green background.
- We use the English name (if present) from this sign as the name of the city.
- We consider this sign to be the boundary of the city from Waze’s point of view.
- Sometimes the city name has more than one possible spelling. In this case, we use the spelling shown on the approach roads into the city.
- Smaller approach roads sometimes don’t have a sign with the city name, so we use the point at which the speed limit starts to reduce as the city boundary for Waze.
- Larger towns and cities often don’t have a name sign on their approach roads, but the name should be well known, and we use the speed limit reduction point as the city boundary.
Suburb names
- For the four largest cities (Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway) that have defined suburb names, we don’t use the city name for segments, but use the suburb name instead.
- Segments of the M50 ring motorway in Dublin do have “Dublin” as their city name. We did this to get “Dublin” to appear in the live map (although this may no longer be necessary).
- The centre of Dublin is divided into “Dublin 1” (north of the river) and “Dublin 2” (south of the river). These numbers are postal districts. No other postal district numbers should be used.
- Waze doesn’t support counties in Ireland yet. Where there is a duplicate city name (such as Blackrock in Dublin and Blackrock in Cork) we put the county name in brackets after the city name (for example: “Blackrock (Cork)”). The first duplicate city to be named gets to use the name without a county name in brackets, but all subsequent cities with the same name get their county name in brackets.
Townlands
- A townland is a historically-determined subdivision of land outside any urban area, typically much less than 1km across. Despite the name, it has no connection with a town. It is often sparsely-populated and may be completely unpopulated. Townlands often form part of postal addresses in rural areas, so it is likely that a Waze user navigating to a postal address may enter the townland name. Townland boundaries often follow streams, rivers or field boundaries as they were when the townland was first defined. Historical field boundaries often still match modern field boundaries.
- Townland names are used as all or part of minor roads outside towns and cities where the road has no other known name.
- TODO1: how to determine townland names.
- TODO2: how townland names are used on the Waze map.