[Tagging] Highway classification in Antarctica

[Fernando Trebien]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2024 at 14:46, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging
<tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> If very big island has no roads at all except single small road between
> two houses it does not mean it is highway=trunk road.

I agree, but note that the wiki in principle allows this distorted
interpretation twice:

"a road of highest importance, forming the main road network there,
should be highway=trunk" [1]
"highway=trunk: The most important roads in a country's system that
aren't motorways." [2]

The comments here suggest that for a rural settlement to be a trunk it
needs to connect two large settlements, and that the population
thresholds that determine whether a settlement is large can at most be
changed slightly from the default, but not by much, even in sparse
regions. Another way of putting it is that highway "importance" would
have to be assessed by balancing "absolute global importance" and
"relative regional importance", but there is a limit (yet to be
defined) to this relativization.

There is also some confusion in the wiki regarding highway=tertiary. It says:

"highway=tertiary: The next most important roads in a country's
system. (Often link smaller towns and villages)" [2]

And:

"Outside urban areas, tertiary roads are those with low to moderate
traffic which link smaller settlements such as villages or hamlets."
[3]

So what is it that highway=tertiary links? Hamlets, villages, smaller
towns? Any of those?

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Assumptions
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Highway
[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtertiary

--
Fernando Trebien