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It's common. The Pinyin transcription is needed for foreigners to be able to recognize the directions, and so it doesn't need accent marks.

• Terr_ 2y ago
  Yet then foreigners can't accurately repeat it, like "I'm at the corner of X and Y" or "The hotel is the one on Z road."
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    Even if they had the diacritics, it’s unlikely most foreigners could accurately reproduce the tones anyway.
    • Symmetry 2y ago
      And even ignoring the tones, how many foreigners can pronounce pinyin correctly? It takes a very different approach to representing non-Latin vowel sounds with Latin characters than English does, there's 'c' being pronounced 'ts', etc.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        "c" being pronounced as "ts" would be familiar to most people from Central or Eastern Europe, for example. Even coming from English, "c" can often mean "s" which is at least similar. I'd say that the most unusual pinyin mappings are "q" and "x", although both have some analogues in European languages as well.
        • School-Cotton 2y ago
          X is probably familiar to most people because of Xi Jinping's surname. I agree with the notion that Q is the Pinyin letter that would cause the most trouble for Westerners.