I notice that Canada Post and the province now use abbreviated street names. What I mean by that is, for example, “Grafton ST” is used, not “Grafton Street”. The last part is abbreviated (and capitalized):
- ST - street
- DR - drive
- LN - lane
- CRT - court
- AV - avenue
- … and so on …
Here’s a link to the Provincial data.
It seems like the data in OSM for Charlottetown is manually entered, and not uploaded en masse using data from the province.
My feeling is that I would like to change the street names to match EXACTLY what’s defined by the Province. Reasons for doing so:
- it’s always shorter text! This helps in rendering maps, since space is at such a premium on a map.
- it matches exactly the official source. This would make it possible (in principle) to write queries once a year, to see if there’s any mismatch at all between the Province and OSM. Thus the two could be kept in fairly close sync.
- street names are probably the single most important items on a typical map. To be able to verify that they match the Province’s official list would be a boon.

