[Tagging] Deprecate ref=* on ways

[Rob Savoye]

On 6/2/25 6:14 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:

> I'm pretty sure 4 digit Forest Service roads that are a single way and 
> have no reason to be divided (since they tend to be forestry tracks of 
> only a few hundred meters) really can't violate the one object, one 
> OSM entity guideline by tagging ref on way, so that'd be a no-change 
> situation either way.  I'm focusing on all routes that have 2 or more 
> member ways, for this reason.

   Many are more than a few hundred meters sometimes many kilometers on 
very bad, very narrow, 4 wheel drive roads, and not all are 4 digits. 
Each national forest uses it's own ref schema. It's not unusual to see a 
possible highway relation contained a dozen ore more segments, each one 
has difference metadata important to OSM like width, surface, tracktype, 
and smoothess. If you are driving these remote highways, these 
differences are important! To me the name could be in a relation, as it 
is the only consistent tag amongst  all the ways. But each way all needs 
these other tags for each highway segment (way).

     - rob -

-- 
https://www.senecass.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20250602/234bd649/attachment.htm>