Somewhere in the Philippines, there are roads named after countries | Hacker News Reader

Somewhere in the Philippines, there are roads named after countries

nicluo.com

11 pointsgreenbee19 comments

Ok... What's really suspicious is the alphabetically ordered clusters.

It's almost like someone just labeled a bunch of blank streets with a list of nouns.

Any comparative maps of the area, preferably local ones produced inside the Philippines, would help explain things a lot.

Edit 1: Digging into it further, reveals the area is pretty big... I've rounded up the coordinates, exploring a little. 14.485, 121.023 is pretty much the spot he was writing about in the blog, almost every street is strangely named. But for quicker entry and sharing, 14.48, 121.02, is still squarely in the middle of the area.

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The area is also the same on:

Bing Maps ( http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=14.485000~121.025000&lvl=16... ) Nokia Here maps ( http://here.com/14.4851019,121.0251471,17,0,0,normal.day )

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From what I can tell the area these oddly named streets cover is rather extensive. Several municipal regions have the same pattern. These municipal areas show the pattern:

Bakoor City ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Bacoor+City,+Cavite,+Ph... )

City of Las Piñas ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/City+of+Las+Piñas,+Metr... )

Parañaque ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Parañaque,+Metro+Manila... )

Taguig ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Taguig,+Metro+Manila,+P... )

Muntinlupa ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Muntinlupa,+Metro+Manil... )

City of San Pedro ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/City+of+San+Pedro,+Lagu... )

Dasmariñas City ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Dasmariñas+City,+Cavite... )

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I could keep going but Dasmariñas City shows another interesting pattern, the suburb names are pretty generic, such as:

BGY Zone I - B ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Bgy.+Zone+I+-+B,+Dasmar... )

Area 1 ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+1,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Area 3 ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+3,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Area B ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+B,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Area C ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+C,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Area G ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+G,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Area K ( https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Area+K,+Dasmariñas+City... )

Some interesting things like Area 2 and Area B not being present seem conspicuous but not necessarily a pattern, these names are so generic its entirely possible they represent some kind of placeholder policy.

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Edit 2:

Open Street Map shows the same names. Definitely looking deliberate, possibly a historical quirk of some kind that i haven't been able to unearth through Google translate and searching for Filipino phrases to do with road naming.

Further down [1] it was suggested that this is some kind of new development, implying a property manager just named them all in a batch. Well, the fact that the open street map data clearly shows "Chicago"[2] and "Atlanta"[3] located in the very heart of Manilla's industrial port district. This makes it rather hard to consider a 'new development' as an option.

Further, to this, Chicago shows up as the first discrepancy in these names which may lead to some answers. The southern end of 'Chicago' doesn't match up to what Google displays when you view this [4] area on Google maps. It shows 'Chicago' as "Delgado St", and the southern disconnected street is also called "Delgado St" which in the OSM data shows up as "Antonio C. Delgado"[5].

From the look of it, some of these names may be attributable to mistakes, but the underlying question of where these seemingly place holder names originate, remains unanswered.

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Edit 3:

The seemingly weird names are widespread, subsections of the old section of Manila, the Tondo district, are utterly awash with oddness, several dozen marks consisting of just numbers, are evident here on this map level on google maps [6]

Moving further away, I find "Sunshine"[7], and "2.91km"[8] in Quezon City. 2.91km also seems to give Google grief as the name seems to be incorrectly handled on that street, with most of the north end labeled as "2.91km" and the south end "Saint Martin" but when you zoom in, Google starts overlaying both names and the north end isn't recognized as "2.91km" when you ask Google what's at the location.

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Spreading the net wide over the whole country, the names from the northernmost end, at Basco show a difference when viewed in OSM[9] vs Google maps[10]. Google displays the names with "St" added to most of them, all the roads are marked the same on these maps, but on OSM, all the street names lack a suffix indicating as such. Moving south, the names in Calayan on the island of Cagayan seem to lack names on both OSM and Google Maps. Continuing south to the main island, the town of Aparri shows the same pattern on Google[11] and OSM[12] with OSM having no street suffixes.

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Jumping all the way south now, Digos City demonstrates this weirdness nice and clearly. We find "Luna" in Google[13] and OSM[14] with Google not even having the label. Moving around some more, we go to "Apple" in South Cotabato, on Google[15] and OSM[16]. I could keep browsing but I've run out of time to keep digging for now, at least I've ruled out 'local quirk' and found evidence the pattern is evident across the entire Philippines.

Speculatively, if there was no native history of naming routes back before Spanish and then later American rule, or the colonial governments simply didn't care for the native names, its entirely possible that with thousands of streets and roads lacking names or names they could pronounce, early colonial governments merely went over the map and gave each of them one, the mindset of "cant govern what you cant name" being present throughout history, government wanting to be able to refer to places by name in various reports and meetings effectively requiring them to find a way to give all these a name. However this doesn't really cover what are clearly relatively modern urban roads, such as "Chicago" and "Atlanta" found in the port district of Manila, which leaves this theory with a few shortcomings.

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--- 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414256

2 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/29170930

3 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/16176658

4 - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Manila,+Metro+Manila,+Phil...

5 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/16176619

6 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/@14.6128113,120.9634945,15z?h...

7 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Sunshine,+Quezon+City,+...

8 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/2.91KM,+Quezon+City,+Me...

9 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/198496785

10 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Port+Rd,+Basco,+Batanes...

11 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Aparri,+Cagayan,+Philip...

12 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/198505523

13 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/@6.7474661,125.3659606,18z?hl...

14 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/97401719

15 - https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Apple,+General+Santos,+...

16 - http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/60237885

Some places have historically not named their roads. Then westerners come around and say "this won't do, how will we deliver the mail?" and name them all. I'm guessing it all happened just before WWII or something.

Seems I broke something here, I cant actually edit this any more... is there an edit limit I didn't know about? Kind of annoying I cant go back and fix any format issues now.

There is a time limit for editing.

Yep, is is sometimes a bit frustrating!

Filipino here. I used to live somewhat near that place, and we used to joke about going to Germany or Australia when what we really mean is going to one of those streets instead of the actual country. These are suburbs where the real estate developer would follow a certain theme for the nomenclature of the streets. We call these suburbs "villages". In my parent's village, the theme are bird names, and our street is called Sand Piper Drive.

I think that's common with real estate developments everywhere. There's a neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas where all the streets are named after locations in Estonia:

http://i.imgur.com/Z6u2IjI.jpg

Pretty typical. I've seen developments where all of the streets were named after tennis players or golfers.

This is not unusual. Streets need names, and people get increasingly creative. I've lived on Saturn ("Saturnus", the name of an appartment building in Duivendrecht, net Amsterdam), there's a street in the center of Amsterdam called Rusland (Russia), there are towns in Netherland called "America" and "Nederland". And then there's towns that have the same name (which is particularly common in the US, I believe).

It reminds me of some of the names they have on their Jeepneys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeepney When I was there, I saw Jeepneys called "Disneyland" and "McDonald's", etc. Pretty random.

OSM has the same data. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/14.4876/121.0193

This is probably a new development, and they had to name the streets after something.

Definitely not 'a new development' See my next edit above.

New real estate development. Not a new trend. This has been going on for a while where I live too, themed clusters and that (not in the Philippines).

In my city too, in my city too :D

https://www.google.fr/maps/@34.0154491,-4.9881919,18z

There's a similar thing in Pittsburgh, where streets are named after locations of battles in the Mexican War. I was a bit confused the first time I saw this.

And Pennsylvania stands out in having Indiana University of Pennsylvania and California University of Pennsylvania in its state system.

In San Francisco there's a neighborhood where streets are named after cities: http://goo.gl/l9slSp

I was just in Iraq (kurdistan) - and in Dahouk, they have the same.. it was strange arriving in Iraq and driving down Australia road to turn into Montreal street..

They have the same thing in santiago del chile.

https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Comercial+Sct+Germany+L...

I remember that there was another neighborhood with streets named after countries in Santiago, in La Cisterna. Also there is a street named "Central America" that splits into two, one named "North America" and the other "South America".

https://goo.gl/maps/iDDiH

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