If you follow our change log (hint - you should!) you’ll know that yesterday we went live with a small tweak to our results in the case where a road has both a name and a number or identifying code. It varies from country to country, but this is often the case with larger roads or highways. For example in the United States interstate highways have codes like I 95 or in Germany my family lives near Autobahn A 38

In many cases these roads have no other names, but sometimes they do. In such cases we now return both values in the components field of the response.

So for example a geocoding request for the coordinates 48.209068,2.774423 (see in map).

Previously we had returned a response with just the road name. Here’s the JSON response, and you can see the name in the road key:

         "components" : {
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "FR",
            "_type" : "road",
            "country" : "France",
            "country_code" : "fr",
            "county" : "Fontainebleau",
            "postcode" : "77460",
            "road" : "Autoroute de l'Arbre",
            "state" : "Ile-de-France",
            "village" : "Souppes-sur-Loing"
         },

now we return:

         "components" : {
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "FR",
            "_type" : "road",
            "country" : "France",
            "country_code" : "fr",
            "county" : "Fontainebleau",
            "postcode" : "77460",
            "road" : "Autoroute de l'Arbre",
            "road_reference" : "A 77",
            "state" : "Ile-de-France",
            "village" : "Souppes-sur-Loing"
         },

note the road_reference key and value.

But wait, that’s not all! In Europe major highways can also have a European code. In such cases, for example at 48.4091793,2.5544583 (see in map) we now also return the road_reference_intl key and value.

         "components" : {
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "FR",
            "_type" : "road",
            "country" : "France",
            "country_code" : "fr",
            "county" : "Fontainebleau",
            "postcode" : "77630",
            "road" : "Autoroute du Soleil",
            "road_reference" : "A 6",
            "road_reference_intl" : "E 15",
            "state" : "Ile-de-France",
            "village" : "Arbonne-la-For\u00eat"
         },

Happy geocoding,

Ed