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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 22. Dec 2019, at 01:24, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?


road


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


the wiki is correct, road markings are sufficient 


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


from how expressways are defined in the OpenStreetMap wiki I would say they are pretty different on closer inspection 


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


legally (motorways are signposted with start and end signs), and also consequently by access (trunks might be accessible by slower vehicles)


> 
> 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:


regarding the “class”, this is mostly opaque to Germans, it is quite a technical specialist matter, and people are generally only aware of the owner and maintenance entity (Bundesstraße, Landesstraße, Kreisstraße, Gemeindestraße) but not about the highway class, you can get an idea here https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtlinien_für_integrierte_Netzgestaltung

unfortunately the full text is not openly available.

Cheers Martin