All of the road names in Kearny County Kansas were changed several years ago. I am new to openstreetmap and was wondering if there’s a way that all the road names could be updated in this County. I’m not sure how to do it, but I have an official county map with all the new road names that I could attach here. Any help would be appreciated.
Can you find a federal level map? US federal maps are OK to use from a copyright point of view, but county maps may well be subject to copyrights.
The preferred method is to compare the two maps, to find where there may be changes, and then go to the individual roads and check how they are actually signed on the ground.
If you can get copyright clearances, there is some automation that you could do, but you should still check each change by eye. You should also get permission from your national OSM mailing list, as this would be a bulk import. One of then dangers is that the county map may not match the sign on the ground. In that case, the sign takes precedence.
Changing all the names seems a silly thing to do!
Changing all the names seems a silly thing to do!
Often the purpose of name change projects is to create a standard naming convention that helps emergency services locate the source of a call:
- Make ‘streets’ run one direction, while ‘avenues’ run perpendicular
- Eliminate duplicate road names in different parts of the same jurisdiction
- Eliminate road name conflicts with neighboring jurisdiction
- Correct the case of a road that has been split into 2 separate segments but still has the same name
Sounds like a particularly US thing.
We get this sort of issue with bus stops in the UK, but not generally with road names, and certainly not bulk renamings of either.
Yes, MikeN is right, this change was done so emergency services had consistent addresses to get to people’s farmsteads. All the road signs have been changed to the new system, and each house has an address based on this numbering system. Many of the roads never had names before the change, at least not on the ground, and many houses didn’t even have physical addresses, for example many that live in the country have a PO box in town for mail. Our physical address used to be 1/2 mile east and 1 mile south of S road and Road 25, you can only imagine how confusing that was to try to get a delivery! Now our address is 1102 RD V5, much simpler and easier to understand, all signs have been updated for the new addresses, I can post a picture of some signs if anyone needs proof. However, I both google maps and openstreetmaps do not show these updates. This area has been called by some the last frontier!
If you have the official county map, one method is to get official permission to use it from the county using the letter at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/GettingPermission#Letter_Template3 as a template.
Assuming that this is a rural county with few enough roads that each could be done by simply going in an editor and typing in the new name, the documentation for the “Import process” would be much simpler than the usual rigorous review, which is normally meant to prevent sloppy imports that corrupt Openstreetmap data with unusable information.
Ok, thanks for these ideas