Duplicate cities/BetterSchemeRevisionTracked Discussion View history

Better Scheme for Removing Duplication

As long as the city name differs by one character, you will not get the error message. But we don’t recommend kludgey fixes. The best way to clear duplication is to find something unique, but accurate, that identifies a municipality.

• Examples
  • If a borough and a township share the same name, rename the township segments to read Foocity Twp.
  • In Pennsylvania, we have several instances of three or more townships sharing the same name. So we append the county name to the township name, Foocity, Countyname, since that is how they are uniquely identified to the state government.

The simplest scheme is to resolve conflicts in this order:

1. First determine if both areas really do use that cityname. For example, sometimes a neighborhood name is imported into the map, but that name is not frequently used in addresses. See if any businesses in the area advertise with the Waze-assigned name. If one of them is not truly used, then reassign all the streets of that "city" to the correct name (typically the surrounding city). Note that this often happens with CDPs, as seen in the next paragraph.
2. If a postal area or CDP (Census Designated Place as found on the Census Tract Maps) and a city conflict, you will probably have to append something to the city name. CDPs and Postal areas usually don’t have any other common appellation, in which case, there is no other option for their naming. The city will frequently have some way of qualifying it, e.g., appending Twp (Township), City, etc. Do not add a suffix arbitrarily though; you can'd call a place Twp unless it really is a township. Note, however, that some CDPs are not commonly used for addresses and should follow the rule specified in the previous paragraph.
3. If a well-known city and a lesser-known city conflict, give preference to keeping the base name to the most well-known city, and find another way to differentiate the less-well-known one.
4. If all else is equal, choose one to keep the original name, and add the minimum clear suffix to alter the others.