[Tagging] [Talk-us] Trunk VS primary,

[Joseph Eisenberg]

Do highway=trunk in German always have a physical barrier such a kerb
to separate the two directions, even if they are not a dual
carriageway?

The English highway=trunk page says this about Germany "The
carriageways are separated physically or by road markings".

An automated translation of the German page suggests that these
"Autobahnähnliche Straße" can be translated "expressways".

But it's not clear how they are distinguished from highway=motorway
features in Germany.

I think this shows the disadvantage of determing the top-level highway
feature tag (primary, trunk) based on certain physical and legal
characteristics rather than on class in the road network: a number of
different features are combined in one tag which might better be
seprate tags like "expressway=yes" + "motorroad=no" +
"dual_carriageway=yes" + "acces=" etc. to express the important
characteristics of the road.

Joseph Eisenberg

On 12/22/19, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> sent from a phone
>
>>> On 21. Dec 2019, at 22:54, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>> Thank you for the correction. So highway=trunk in German is similar to
>> expressway=yes in the USA?
>
>
> I am not familiar with US tagging, but the expressway page says they must be
> dual carriageways and can have at grade intersections:
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:expressway
>
> the German trunks must not have at grade intersections (like motorways) and
> can be single carriageway (but do not allow overtaking using the opposite
> direction).
>
>
> Cheers Martin