[Tagging] Road classification

[John Willis]

> On Sep 2, 2015, at 4:19 PM, Mateusz Konieczny <matkoniecz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> From this it sounds like this tagging in OSM is relying too much on
> official classification rather than on real road importance.

And similar to someone printing out an email and faxing it to someone, we have reached a cultural impasse that the Japanese (big giant stereotype incoming) impose upon themselves - because in so many aspects of their lives - the paperwork or ceremony or existing standard is vastly more important than the people holding the paperwork, people in the ceremony, or a new method that makes the old standard useless (looking at you, fax machine!). This has benefits but also tremendous technology drawbacks. 

The map honoring the roads is vastly more important than the people using them. You eventually end up using width as a yardstick more than anything - which is why  (good) Japanese maps are all area based at high zoom levels - no lines, all areas - so you can see that a road to the train station is so small that your minivan cannot fit through the walls along the road in the middle. 

The actualities on the ground means a bypass road should be built, but come hell, high water, or a 20% incline on a hairpin turn on road 2 meters thick - that is a primary road - because the road has always been one for 150 years, so why change the paperwork? The paperwork is more important than representing reality. The smooth two-lane road with shoulders bypass road 100 years newer is obviously a tertiary.  

This greatly affects googles (representation of the roads at lower zoom (where they rely on googles in-house line-vector mapping style rather than Zenrin's area based representation), though they don't try nearly as hard as OSM to render all the different grades of road, so the mismatches can be even more pronounced. 

But - most importantly - this implementation is what japanese people expect and require from their maps, as the shape of the roads gives users a spatial awareness of where they are - and changing those roads means making an "inferior" map. 

Javbw.