[Tagging] Describe explicitly that values of highway tag do not imply anything about road quality (except highway=motorway and highway=motorway_link)

[Mateusz Konieczny]

2015-08-19 9:11 GMT+02:00 Lauri Kytömaa <lkytomaa at gmail.com>:

> 1) I'd say that since "trunk" is the next best thing below
> motorway, in any country (or "region") there has to be something
> between motorway standards and "unsurfaced tract unusable
> after major rains" - primary is a valid long distance road, too. I'm
> not even saying a trunk road could't be unpaved, or that it couldn't
> be repeatedly blocked "sometimes". I did ask on the wiki
> highway=trunk tag discussion page in 2009 whether anyone knows
> any roads marked as trunk in osm which are unpaved, and only
> later read somewhere that south of Sahara most trunk roads are
> unpaved, but in that discussion there was no mention of whether
> they are (generally) "usable" after major rains.
>

OK, I will change it to primary to make it more consistent with reral usage
and
add "and highway=trunk quality in one region may be worse than
highway=tertiary
in another".


>
> 2) This gets a little philosophical, because it's about what makes a
> road a road. It's somewhat misleading to write that the highway tag
> doesn't say _anything_ about the quality, when it's easily read as
> "doesn't say anything about the physical properties" - a road is,
> IMO, by definition something that looks like a road and works like
> a road (and in western world necessarily also: built as a road), not
> any strip of land where somebody once drove through, so it does
> describe the limits of what the physical properties can be expected
> to be, i.e. the list of worst possible attributes that it needs to fulfill
> for people call it a road. At the moment, I don't have a ready
> sentence to add, but it's worth noting that the concept of "a road"
> includes both usage and physical appearance.
>

Yes, for example Curiosity tracks on Mars would not qualify as
highway=trunk :)

I think that it is already handled by defining trunk to service as road.
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