I wanted to name a road. At one place, the road was split into 3 small straight segments and I was annoyed because I didn’t want to name each one and there would be a small tag for each segment. “Ahhhh, I wiill just combine them” I said to myself! “Some idiot has left these segments alone” I thought again. Will ID let me combine these segments?….. yes! good. I was happy and my road was named.

I had a bad feeling, there was just this instant feeling of ohh, something is not right. Then it hit me ….town-land boundaries, ….. you know those annoying blue lines that are everywhere in Ireland….. the ones that I have turned off under Map Data-> Map Features-> Others. The ones I try to forget about. I turned them on and yea, I had combined the boundary relations when I had combined my road. Damn, what a mess. It was too late to fix late at night so I waited until morning. So after a bit of local history in town-land names, I undid my mistake.

My message is to be careful when combining ways and naming roads. On one hand, I want to name every segment so every house has a matching street name, on the other hand, i wish i didn’t have to name every little segment (this is especially true in housing estates with their little branch roads, all with the same street name).

I dunno, naming roads is funny, there are old road names, and official road names and there are the proper postal address names for the streets. Then there are the locals that have their own names for that part of town and if they are giving you directions, you better know them!! I prefer to keep the local names as long if they are well established. OSM is all about what is there right now, it can track the dynamic changing of a street name over time…. in theory….i think. What do you think local street names or strictly official street names??

I should probably go read the wiki and find out that it is all ruled out for me somewhere. I just started and I’m learning as I go and I am enjoying it, :)