[Tagging] Classifying roads from Trunk to Tertiary and Unclassified

Paul Allen pla16021 at gmail.com
Mon Aug 12 18:06:28 UTC 2019


On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 at 18:25, Fernando Trebien <fernando.trebien at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> There are all sorts of opinions on this matter, but trying to define
> classification rules based on physical characteristics or
> administrative responsibility (municipality, state or national) always
> led to unexpected situations here. I guess the UK is somewhat unique
> in having an official classification system that matches the
> topological organization of the road system.
>

I would hope the UK is not unique.  The reason it matches (mostly) in the
UK is that
the classification was assigned based on the characteristics of the roads.
It
wasn't somebody making decisions based upon a whim, it tried to assign
categories based upon usage: it defined a route as being primary if it was
the best route.

Yes, it is the case that trunks are administered by central government, but
again
it wasn't (I hope) that roads were arbitrarily designated as trunks but
that some
roads were so important that central government retained control over them.

We did it all that way because people want guidance in choosing the "best"
route
between A and B.  Before we had routeing algorithms, that was the only way
to do
it.  What surprises me is that some other countries didn't do it that way.

-- 
Paul
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