Should I pluralize a channel's index slug? Lets say I have a channel called places, which has the following URL : 

http://example.com/places


The url points to a directory of individual places.

However, when you click into an entry, each entry is a place, so it might make more sense to have each entry's url to be : 

http:/example.com/place/place-name


Am I right in assuming that the best way to go about this would be to use a route for entries? Or is it best practice to keep things the same for consistency?
It doesn’t matter to Craft, but generally I think it’s better to have consistent URLs, so they can be discoverable. For example if you land on /places/place-name, it would be reasonable to assume that you could chop off “place-name” and find an index of all the places at /places/.