Why are some cities shown as seperate regions on the UK map?

Question

I noted recently that a number of smaller regions have appeared on the UK map, eg:

I read elsewhere that Project GC might get its region data from OpenStreetMap, so I did a little digging. It looked like it may be that unitary authorities were being treated the same as counties. This does appear to be the case as OpenStreetMap does not distinguish between administrative counties and unitary authorities - both are recorded as admin_level:6

Is this intentional, or should it only be counties?

I hate urban caches so it's slightly annoying having to get a cache in each of these urban areas as well as the county to fill all the map in!

Answer 1

With the map you have linked, I assume that you refer to what we call "counties", and not regions. Our region data is divided in the same way as Groundspeak, to be compatible.

For county data, we have digged around in OSM to find data that matches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_and_non-metropolitan_counties_of_England.

We know and understand that this is a complex topic in United Kingdom, and that there is not one opinion how it should work. We have been using a few different variants, and we believe this one is the best. Regardless of what system we have used, there has been complaints.

We actually have two tickets open regarding this topic. But it takes hours to handle them, so we haven't been able to address them yet.

Comments

Yeah, they're counties, except the ones that are unitary authorities aren't shire counties. Looks like OpenStreetMap treats unitary authorities and shire counties as the same which is where the real problem lies.

Personally, I think the unitary authorities shouldn't be separate, but there's then an issue of which shire county do you assign them to if they're not enclosed. Sounds like a world of pain.