[Tagging] Access restrictions and expressway=yes

[Fernando Trebien]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2021 at 6:53 PM Minh Nguyen
<minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
> But we've endured years of edit wars between
> ardent road classificationists because some expressways are far too
> short or insignificant to be tagged as highway=trunk.

Perhaps Americans would benefit from trying functional classification
again? [1] That article was mysteriously deleted but there are still
many links to it from various places in the wiki. [2] Waze chose this
system and it seems to produce a nice result, balancing importance
with routing needs. At the very least, it does not lead to fragmented
road networks and the resulting map is easier to read, for example,
for purely geographical purposes (the main need of most OSM data
consumers), as such, with an elegant and professional appearance. This
is what we adopted in Brazil in part because the result is not
fragmentary (like what we see in the UK, as opposed to what we see in
France and Germany; maps like Google and Here.com do not have these
fragmentary networks). Edit wars and especially heated debate has
become much rarer since then. Routing is best solved by tagging what's
"wrong" with specific ways (surface, smoothness, maxspeed, etc.).

In Brazil, there has been some discussion about how the definition of
motorway should be applied here. Traditionally, the criteria here have
been perhaps too flexible and included many roads that are not
controlled-access. So, I was thinking that maybe they should be mapped
as expressways instead.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway%20Functional%20Classification%20System
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging

-- 
Fernando Trebien