Minnesota/Cities and towns/Main Discussion View history

Revision as of 15:25, 1 March 2015 by DallasGrant (talk | contribs) (*/Cities_and_towns/Main*/)


Minnesota bases cities and towns on standard city line boundaries and not USPS standards. Where the city limits end, another city or township will begin.

Minnesota does show townships throughout the state. Keep in mind that many of these are named incorrectly. All township names should be [Township] Twp. It should not end in the full word Township or be called Greater [Township] Area.

If we see an error with a city, town, or township name, DO NOT correct the issue in the map itself. Correcting it in the map either will give you errors when you attempt or it will smudge cities. Even if you update every street in the township, the incorrect city name will still exist and will show both names on the live map.

If you see an issue, post it Here and we will submit a report to fix the city name. Keep in mind that this is a very time-consuming process and averagely takes 2-3 months to show correctly on the editing map and another 1-2 months after that before the live map will see it.

We currently are running an experiment with adding residential addressing as a place point using the USPS city as opposed to the township or city it is actually located. We are verifying the negative implications of this and seeing if the positives outweigh the negatives. If you see this on the map, please do not delete it or follow suit as this is an isolated test.

Lock Standards

In Minnesota we have a set minimum standard for locking roads based on segment type. Any road of a certain segment type must be locked at least to the rank (level) in the chart below. Roads may be locked higher for protection and special situations (areas with construction, tricky design, frequent mistakes, imaging inaccuracies, and the like), but should not be locked lower.

A great time to implement these locks is while bringing the road types of an area into compliance with the current US road type standards (FC and highway systems). Lock the roads based on type after they've been set to current US road type standards.

Minnesota Minimum Locking Rank Standard
Segment Type Statewide
 Freeway  4
 Ramp  Highest rank of connected segments
 Major Highway  3
 Minor Highway  3
 Primary Street  2
 Street  1
 • • • • Ferry • • • •   5
 |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-| Railroad |-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|  2

Note: Before locking these roads to these standards, you must verify that the name of the road, direction of the road, and turn functionality is correct. If this information is not correct, it should not be locked unless we are having issues with editors in the area. The only exception here is Freeways due to the routing priority. Refer to Unlock Requests if you need a section of road altered or unlocked to correct an issue.

Additional: