[Tagging] Classifying roads from Trunk to Tertiary and Unclassified

[Paul Allen]

On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 at 15:32, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Paul, thank you for clarifying the situation in England, as much as it
> can be clarified.
>

As with OSM tagging, it evolved.  So we have things that are not ideal
simply because of
historical accident.  If the UK were to come up with an all-new
classification scheme,
based on everything we now know, it would probably look a lot different.
But the cost of
replacing all the signage, and all the printed maps, and the knowledge in
people's
heads means that will never happen.  If we were to redesign the human body
from
scratch it wouldn't have a recurrent laryngeal nerve, the epididymus would
take a
different route and the eyes wouldn't be wired backwards, but evolution
can't do that.

I'm sorry we inflicted our mess onto OSM, but that's just the way OSM
evolved.  BTW,
that mess applies to the whole of Great Britan, not just England (things
are somewhat
different in Northern Ireland).

Generally I'm thinking about the many countries, outside of Europe,
> where the tagging system has not yet been established, and where the
> government hasn't clearly categorized the highways yet.
>

Your original post read like you intended it to be applied globally.  As a
set of
heuristics to apply in places where there are no official categories of
roads,
then go for it.  I think it needs more work because the road network is a
mesh
with many pairs of population centres having many routes between them,
some routes being longer, some routes being quicker.  The preferred route
from X to Y may be a detour via Z even though there is a shorter, direct
route
from X to Y.

-- 
Paul
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