Pennsylvania/Intro

Current Issues in Pennsylvania

Addresses damaged by City Merge

In 2019, 139 cities were merged in Pennsylvania. For every city that disappeared from the map, any places addresses that used that city were damaged by the change. In most cases, that information can be recovered.

Quick Fix

Get WME City Merge Place Address Fixer

When you see several places with no address, and those places have addresses in the app, it may be because a city merge messed up the addresses. So get a copy of WME City Merge Place Address Fixer, enable it, and click on one of the places. If it can, it will find the same address used in the app and fix the place address in WME. If it can't, it will tell you so. Either way, double check and fix that address. When you are done, you can disable the City Merge Place Address Fixer.

More details and tools

Some places had all their address information filled in. Then it seemed to disappear right after the place's city was merged into another city. The city merge process works great for segments (they get their new city name, and all their address information looks perfect after the merge). But it does not work properly for segments - the HN is actually still there, but the streetID is messed up, and the entire address looks blank in WME. In 2019, PA SMs submitted more than 100 city merge requests and did not realize the merges were causing a problem until after they were all completed.

Here's a little more detail on what went wrong: During a city merge, all the segments with the old city name get a new city name and a new cityID. That means they also get a new streetID to go with the new cityID. Afterwards, the old cityID and the old streetID are removed from the databaseSince the backend process did not handle the places properly, they still have the old streetID in their address field. The entire address looks blank in WME, even though it isn't really. But since Waze doesn't know anything about the streetID, it can't look up a street name or city name for that street. WME cannot display the place address. If you search for the place in the app, you will probably be able to see the address just as it was the last time an editor made a change. Because the place address was not changed, there were no changes uploaded to the server the app uses.

Tools you can use

• List of merged cities
• WME City Merge Place Address Fixer
• Optional - WAL (Wide Angle Lens)and WAL Places City Merge Problems

Installing everything

• Install WME City Merge Place Address Fixer and make sure it is enabled.
• Optional - WAL:
  • If you have installed WAL Places, then disable it.
  • Get the WAL script to find the problem places: In Tampermonkey, hit the "+" tab to start a new script. Copy the contents of the file WAL Places City Merge Problems into the new script and hit ctrl-S to save it.
• Refresh the WME browser window or start over in a new browser tab.

Finding broken places

• Use the permalink in the merged cities sheet to find an area that may still have broke addresses. places
• Optional: Use WAL to create an area to scan. In WAL places, select only the "undefined street ID" filter, and in the scan tab select the area and Places.

Fixing broken places

• Select one of the places on the WAL-produced list at a time. The City Merge Place Fixer will automatically check for the problem and try to fix it. It will tell you if it succeeded, and you'll see the save counter increase if it does.
• Double-check the address for the place. Fix any incorrect information.
• If the Place Fixer cannot figure out the correct address, then you can probably figure it out for yourself. If you use WMEPH, double check that the street and city it suggests are the correct ones for this place.
• If you fix all the broken places around one of the cities, mark that city as done on the google sheet.