[OSM-newbies] highway shapefiles - how to translate road types?

[Chris Hunter]

Welcome to the wonderful world of anglicisms ;) - Many of the English
language OSM tags were developed in Merry Old before they came here to the
states.  There are several mappers that are trying to find a better
translations into the existing tagging format based on the US Federal
Highway Functional Classification system, but unless/until the highway=* tag
gets extended again, the British tags are the ones to use.

Here's my current understanding of the tag types

"highway" types =
>     'residential' - Can drive on, it's the default from the 2007 TIGER
> import if the road type wasn't coded correctly
>     'track' - Paved road only 1 car-width wide.
>     'trunk' - Non-Interstate freeways (no stoplights)
>     'secondary' - Non-divided multi-lane roads (has stoplights, residential
> roads might connect)
>     'motorway_link' - on/off ramps to US Interstates
>     'primary' - Divided multi-lane roads (has stoplights)
>     'service' - Driveways, alleys, restricted-access roads, etc...
>     'motorway' - US Interstates
>     'tertiary' - 2-lane roads (has stopsigns, but few/no stoplights.
> Mostly connected to by residential roads)
>     'footway' - Sidewalk
>     'unclassified' - Unknown status road.  Might be passable by car, might
> not. - see attributes
>     'primary_link' - On/offramps to primary roads - not sure how often this
> is used since TagWatch isn't covering the US right now
>     'trunk_link' - On/Off ramps to Non-Interstate freeways
>     'secondary_link' - On/offramps to secondary roads - not sure how often
> this is used since TagWatch isn't covering the US right now
>     'path' - Walking path
>     'Driveway' - you park in a driveway, and drive on a parkway ;)
>     'pedestrian' - Roads that have been closed to vehicle traffic.  You see
> these in downtown areas, especially
>     'road' - unknown status road - probably passable by car.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/newbies/attachments/20091012/7d091b75/attachment.html>