The Grind

After 13 days I today finished my review of all streets in Mülheim an der Ruhr, added the street name origin and roadkey ger: “Straßenschlüssel” where possible.

I have been casually adding street name origins for some time, an interesting topic if you are into history I think. At some point I set out to review all streets from A-Z, and while doing that add the roadkey too, as described in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Key:de:strassenschluessel

Orientation and inspiration came from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Düsseldorf/Projekte/Straßennamen

Gladly Mülheim provides a list that had both, a name origin hint and a reference from that I could get the roadkey, on their website: https://geo.muelheim-ruhr.de/node/14033

Along the way I made some minor additions, on about 4 occasions OSM didn’t have the street name or was missing renames for instance.

After having worked through the list I verified the presence of “Straßenschlüssel” by Overpass:

[out:csv("name",
         "de:strassenschluessel_exists",
         "de:strassenschluessel",
         "local:strassenschluessel",
         "wikidata",
         "wikipedia",
         "wikimedia_commons",
         "name:etymology:start_date",
         "name:etymology:wikidata",
         "name:etymology:wikidata:missing",
         "name:etymology:wikidata:note",
         "name:etymology:wikipedia",
         "name:etymology:description",
         "name:etymology:note";
         yes;
         "|"
        )]
[timeout:250];

{{geocodeArea:Mülheim an der Ruhr}}->.searchArea;

(  
  wr[highway]
    [highway != platform] 
    [name]
    [!"de:strassenschluessel"]
    ["de:strassenschluessel_exists" != "no"]
    (area.searchArea);
); 

out geom;

Some smaller adjustments and corrections using ALKIS as a source later, some streets are simply private streets that will never get a key, Mülheim now has a pretty much complete documentation of “Straßenschlüssel” for all regular streets, and about 765 of 1072 listed streets have their names origin at least briefly documented.

Whats next?

There is still quite a substantial number of streets whose names origins where not documented in the provided list, I would like to fill those blanks. Contacted the administration to see if they can provide more information, I might also pay the local archive a visit.

While reviewing the streets I came across a number I have heard where renamed after 1933, there was an “Adolf-Hitler-Straße” for instance, I like to get those information together and document it via e.g. “old_name:1933-“.

Some border streets are currently listed as Mülheim, but seem to actually belong to neighbouring cities, I like to have a look into that too.

On many streets I wasn’t able to link to a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry, I like to look into that, possibly adding items to Wikipedia.