<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div>Hi, what a wonderful discussion about a topic I love to read, think and talk about. I will need to take some time with a large beverage to read through the entire thread. One thing I picked up on is a lot of mentions of unclassified and residential and how to disambiguate between them.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I pitched the idea of getting rid of unclassified altogether in a lightning talk at SOTM and started a proposal wiki page which a few of you contributed to: <a href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/highway%3Dstreet">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/highway%3Dstreet</a> <br></div><div><br></div><div>There's some discussion on the Talk tab of that page as well.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I would really enjoy hearing your thoughts on this. My main objective with this has been to simplify the 'bottom end' of the highway hierarchy by removing a distinction that is, to my mind, not significant enough to warrant separate unclassified and residential road classes.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks, happy mapping,<br></div><div id="sig78141864"><div class="signature">--<br></div><div class="signature"> Martijn van Exel<br></div><div class="signature"> m@rtijn.org<br></div><div class="signature"><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>On Thu, Sep 16, 2021, at 13:21, Jmapb wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><p>Highway=unclassified is one of the several annoying OSM tags that
does not mean what the words mean. It doesn't mean that the
classification is nebulous, or that a decision is pending. It's
for roads that connect locations but are a tier on the road
network below tertiary. And yes, the unfortunate name
"unclassified," I'm told, is derived from standard highway
nomenclature in the UK and so made it's way into OSM. <br></p><p>Likewise highway=residential is also one of the annoying OSM tags
that isn't to be tagged or interpreted in a literal fashion. It's
used for local public roads that don't serve the purpose of
linking locations. It doesn't matter whether these roads are
alongside dwellings, factories, offices, shops, or wilderness.<br></p><p>These are the tagging standards I've come to believe in. Carto
and other renderers may choose to draw unclassified and
residential in the same width and color, and routers may choose
not to favor one over the other, but these choices don't change
the definitions. <br></p><p>I can't say exactly whose word I took on these definitions, or
when or where -- probably some combination of the wiki, the
mailing list, conversations, changeset comments, and other
channels -- but I've been under the naive impression that this was
a settled question. It seems it's not! If the nature of the low
end of the highway classification hierarchy is indeed up for
debate, I'd say the NY proposal's recommendations for anything
below tertiary might be better replaced with a simple text that
recommends following standard tagging practices and local
conventions.<br></p><p>Jason<br></p><div class="qt-moz-cite-prefix">On 9/11/2021 8:11 PM, Eric Patrick
wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CACYhaoZsTN=vDYzSSMBz6sNGC3r7WPPDs5rH9sXk2w_1UUdUbg@mail.gmail.com"><div dir="ltr">Isn't UNCLASSIFIED something the Europeans or maybe
just the British use for their designations? Does it have a
higher or lower priority than RESIDENTIAL roads? I did some
testing in Oklahoma and found that TERTIARY and RESIDENTIAL both
equal the same. Routing doesn't prefer one over the other. As
Brian had pointed out here, OSM-carto doesn't make that
distinction either.<br></div><div><br></div><div class="qt-gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="qt-gmail_attr">On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 7:18
PM Brian M. Sperlongano <<a href="mailto:zelonewolf@gmail.com">zelonewolf@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="qt-gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-color:rgb(204, 204, 204);border-left-style:solid;border-left-width:1px;padding-left:1ex;"><div dir="ltr"><div>Thanks Jason, Kevin, and the NY mapping community for
all the hard work that's going into this!<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><div>Regarding: <br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="qt-gmail_quote"><blockquote class="qt-gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-color:rgb(204, 204, 204);border-left-style:solid;border-left-width:1px;padding-left:1ex;"><div>There has always been
a<br></div><div> highway hierarchy with unclassified at the bottom rank,
and then<br></div><div> residential below that, ie, not ranked at all.
Unclassified is for the<br></div><div> most minor roads that link locations, residential is for
public roads<br></div><div> that don't. How these classifications are mapped to
reality varies<br></div><div> wildly over the globe (the names themselves are nearly
meaningless) but<br></div><div> the suggestion that we should choose between these two
classifications<br></div><div> by the *type* of traffic carried -- not by the role in
linking<br></div><div> locations, the amount of traffic, the distance covered,
or the road's<br></div><div> routing prominence -- seems like a sharp departure from
tagging norms.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>We had fairly extensive, and quite inconclusive
discussions about whether unclassified and residential
are peers, or whether unclassified is "above"
residential in the hierarchy. Certainly from a render
perspective, openstreetmap-carto and OpenMapTiles (the
two I happen to be familiar with) do not make any
distinction between the two, rendering both of them
equally. I've heard it noted that some routers do give
unclassified less of a router penalty than residential
but more than tertiary.<br></div><div><br></div><div>In RI, I've been using unclassified for minor roads
that don't qualify for residential, service, or track,
or tertiary. For example, a minor road to a dead-end
industrial area. The folks up in Vermont have been
using it as an intermediate level between residential
and tertiary. I don't think there's really a right or
wrong answer to this question, but it didn't seem like
from our discussions that it's something we have a
consensus or settled answer on.<br></div></div></div><div>_______________________________________________<br></div><div> Talk-us mailing list<br></div><div> <a href="mailto:Talk-us@openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">Talk-us@openstreetmap.org</a><br></div><div> <a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us</a><br></div></blockquote></div></blockquote><div>_______________________________________________<br></div><div>Talk-us mailing list<br></div><div><a href="mailto:Talk-us@openstreetmap.org">Talk-us@openstreetmap.org</a><br></div><div><a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us</a><br></div><div><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div></body></html>