Oh, bother. Small can of worms here? Here's more than you ever wanted to know:
Label naming conventions are mostly inherited from the CHM project. One of the guidelines is to leave off non-essential directional prefixes, E.G. "East 3rd Street" would become "3rdSt", not "E3rdSt".
If it's an "essential" part of the road name, it can be left in. What exactly "essential" is has never been too clearly defined, but here's an example: the road to/through the north half of the town of Palermo, North Palermo Road.
I decided that "West" is an essential part of the road name, mostly because I didn't see any corresponding East Genesee St.
In these cases, North/South/East/West would be abbreviated like any other word in a waypoint label, IE. Nor/Sou/East/West.
(IOW, "NPalRd" on
ME137 should more properly be "NorPalRd".) Early systems such as usany, usame (which were among the first state systems), or usaus went live before this rule was solidly codified/understood, and hence have a good number of
NFooRd, SBarAve, EBazSt, etc. that we've not bothered to go back and "fix". Even since this guideline came into being, it's not clear how fully we've followed it, and such labels might be found in new systems as well.
"WGenSt" on NY5 is in use. I'm not too inclined to bother fixing it, though I
could rename it, and use "WGenSt" as an AltLabel.
Or, if we just decided as a group that N/S/E/W are OK in labels after all...