Maryland/Maryland Highway Classification/Place name assessment

This page follows a discussion in the #local-maryland slack chat about the use of place=* in Maryland and how it fits in with the goals of the new United States highway classification guidance documented at United States/2021 Highway Classification Guidance.

Background

In 2014, many of Maryland's place names were given values for place=* corresponding to their population as of the 2010 census. Maryland has few incorporated places outside of its largest city of Baltimore, with Baltimore County having none at all, and many destinations throughout the state lacking some combination of a census designation, postal designation, or incorporated status. This update to place names based on population helped to allow places that are significant but lack incorporation such as Towson to be tagged with place=city on the basis that more than 50,000 people live there.

For highway classification, we are assessing how to make the street map in the United States look more like it forms a discernable network between destinations at a low zoom level. In doing this, it became apparent that Maryland had quite a few notable destinations that were still omitted at a low zoom level, in part because of place names with populations tied to boundaries much smaller than the area associated with that place name, and also because of population being used as an absolute criteria rather than relative to surroundings. It would make sense to have the Eastern Shore look less bare at this level even though it is much more sparsely populated than greater Baltimore, given that larger cities aren't competing for space there, and that it includes places which have more transportation connections than their population might suggest due to their popularity as regional destinations. Further, place=* is used to describe rank under definitions that are common internationally but which do not carry the same meaning in common American vernacular. A large outlying settlement that could be a destination in its own right could be described as a suburb in America so long as it is in the orbit of a larger city, but suburbs are understood in many other countries such as the UK or Australia as being parts of towns and cities, at a rank slightly above neighborhood but below a town. This has resulted in some American settlements which are larger than many places tagged with place=town to be interpreted as only significant enough to be rendered at high zoom levels because they are tagged with place=suburb. It would make sense to conform to the international understanding of place=*, as it would allow us to highlight significant places in Maryland that aren't necessarily discernable based on population alone, and prevent significant places which may include neighborhoods of their own from being treated similarly to places tagged with place=neighbourhood.

The objective of this page is to document a heuristic for assigning place=* that draws from additional objective reference points besides population to allow for a more even treatment of Maryland place names that results in something recognizable at each zoom level. What those reference points are is ultimately a decision which involves some subjectivity, but making the decisions for "rank" based on some kind of documented justification could help us arrive at a stable and broadly agreeable representation of place names in the state.

Tentative criteria

At the moment, this list is intended as a starting point for discussion. Anything here is open to change and can be considered a work in progress until we have something everyone can agree on. Taking a look at the area in the Americana style can be helpful for visualizing how these place names are displayed in a vector tile map that displays fewer place names at lower zoom levels, with a ranking based on place=*. OSM Carto ranks place names this way as well, although the contrast looks less stark as the more granular place distinctions are allowed to appear a bit earlier.

• place=city - these are places that would be shown at z7 in a vector tile map, at the same time that you can see Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Annapolis together. Maryland should have more cities than those three but wouldn't necessarily benefit from elevating every populous bedroom community of Baltimore or D.C. to city status. This is the status that will likely require more careful consideration, which can be outlined more thoroughly in a section below. It is likely we can work backwards from some generally accepted ideas about what are clearly significant destinations to determine what to do about the various places that could go either way. A combination of nominal population, spatial position, prevalence in residential and commercial postal addresses, and significance incurred by a county seat status or transportation links may all be considered in these determinations. Example: Frederick, MD.

• place=town - most places in Maryland that can be described as places where thousands of people live, and places which can be understood to have smaller "parts" which might be understood as neighborhoods or districts, can effectively be given town status. This way there would be a relatively impartial display of Maryland's settlements secondary to "city" status that can be shown at the same zoom level. However, census population alone is insufficient in discerning what place names are used to describe where many people live, due to the inconsistencies in designation described above. If a place name is used as a postal town for a ZIP code which has widespread use in residential addresses, it merits town status. (It should still use the official name rather than the postal name if there is a distinction, so we can avoid giving Brooklyn Park the same name as the adjacent Baltimore City neighborhood of Brooklyn, for example.) If a place name for a census-designated place doesn't share a name with any postal town designation, whether or not it merits town status should be determined based on whether it can be understood to be a distinct place from any other given town status, or a part of another place given town status. Example: Woodlawn, MD.

• place=suburb - places which are census designated but lack postal designation likely fit the suburb status definition as it is used on OSM. These are often understood to be as parts of, or in the orbit of, a place name that does have postal designation. This is where the most recognizable place name for an area might be one with a lower official population than place names considered outlying to it or part of it. The suburb status could also be given to broadly recognized conglomerates of urban or suburban neighborhoods, and to place names that exist in the sense that they can be seen on signage but can't necessarily be constrained to a boundary and likely describes an area overlapping a handful of small residential and commercial areas. Example: Marlow Heights, MD.

• place=neighbourhood - the common American understanding of a neighborhood is relatively close to the understanding elsewhere and this tag likely doesn't require much change. The tag is spelled with a 'u' before the 'r,' so there is some consideration for international conformity to keep in mind if the American spelling is ingrained by habit. Baltimore has over 200 designated neighborhoods which are visible at a high zoom level (mostly, there appear to be some omissions at the time of writing). Unincorporated places like Towson don't typically have designated neighborhoods, but a named, discrete residential area that doesn't have reason to be named in smaller parts can be given a neighborhood status. Example: Turner Station, neighborhood in Dundalk, MD

To be determined

How do village, hamlet, quarter, and isolated_dwelling fit in? OSM Wiki does actually provide some clear "rules of thumb" for identifying these which may differ somewhat from the common understanding of these terms but which can be applied to places in Maryland. A hamlet for example, is defined as being a place with a few hundred inhabitants at most but which is not understood to be part of another place, and isn't close enough to other places to be competing with others for space. Hamlet is a rank just above suburb, as even though they tend to be less populated, they describe somewhere that is more independent and/or spatially distinct. Luke, MD, an incorporated town with fewer than a hundred people which would be a good fit for hamlet. This status and others would likely be applied more sporadically where appropriate, while most places would fit within the definitions of town or suburb.

place=locality may be appropriate for postal designations which only have P.O. Box addresses. Brooklandville for example is in wide enough use in commercial addresses to be recognizable as a place name, and a locality node could be placed at its post office. P.O. Box postal towns should likely be given a higher rank than locality in rural areas, as while they aren't used in residential addresses, there are likely to be local residents whose residences don't have deliverable addresses. place=suburb might be appropriate for these designations as they may be understood to be places that are a "part of" the nearest place name which does have use in residential delivery addresses. Mount Victoria could have a place=suburb node on its post office based on this context.

City list

These are the least controversial candidates for "city" status at the moment:

• Baltimore
• Annapolis
• Frederick
• Hagerstown
• Cumberland
• Ocean City
• Bel Air
• Easton
• Waldorf

Additionally, it is likely Towson and Dundalk will retain "city" status, as the former is the county seat and second most populous settlement of Baltimore County, and the latter is the most populous in the county. It makes sense to highlight parts of Baltimore County that can be understood as regional destinations given the county's large population, and these two seem like good candidates as they have downtowns and discernable subdivisions in addition to being home to over 50,000 people. Working backwards from there, Montgomery County and Prince George's County should have two "city" status places each as these counties are a bit more populous than Baltimore County each. At least one Howard County place should probably have city status. There may be other Eastern Shore destinations which make sense to give city status, such as Salisbury, or places which exist in other "gaps" in Maryland which we may be missing. (Westminster? Frostburg? La Plata? Glen Bernie? Elkton? St. Mary's City probably still shouldn't be city but it should be something that's easy to find without searching for it...)

Narrowing down remaining places

One way to approach this could be setting up some "rules" based on our existing uncontroversial city list. Here is a trial rule set:

• All of the "city" places so far have both a census designation and a postal designation. Other candidates for city should also have both these qualities.

• In order to be a "city" in an urbanized/suburban part of the state, a place should have a population of at least 50,000. These places are in the ballpark of Towson and Dundalk, two city-like unincorporated places that we have identified as significant.

• In rural/exurban parts of the state, a place should have a population of at least 15,000. This is based on the approximate size of Easton, MD, which is the smallest place on the uncontroversial city list. (Bel Air is nominally smaller but is included on the basis of its much larger postal catchment area, as is Ocean City which is included on the basis of its capacity as a tourist destination rather than its permanent residential population.)

• Any place for which the census population is shy of these population thresholds is eligible for a "boost" based on the population of the ZIP Code tabulation area(s) which correspond to the shared postal town. (If that metric results in a higher count than the census one, it overrides it. This would also necessarily use both 2010 census counts and ZIP tabulation counts as that is the most recent year for which ZIP tabulations are available.)

• It may not come up, but any "city" should have some amount of commercial and industrial activity in addition to residential use. A particularly large settlement that is near exclusively residential isn't a great candidate for city status, but we will see if we actually have anything like that.