[talk-au] Highway Tagging

[Brent Easton]

Hi Guys,

I would just like to go over the current Oz highway tagging guidelines. I'm new, so have not been part of any previous discussions.

One of the things I am interested in is creating sets of Garmin GPS maps from OSM. I am thinking of a series of transparent maps of increasing complexity. The 'Base' map would cover all of Australia, but only include cities and basically motorway and trunk roads,

You could then overlay this with smaller sections containing more roads, eg. of the Sydney region, say containing Primary and secondary roads as well. 

The most detailed level would include all the residential and unclassified streets.

I would like the Metropolitan roads list to include 'highway=tertiary' for minor through roads and commonly used routes that are not really important enough to be classed as secondary. In street directories, you often see these marked in yellow. The 'abutters=residential' should be used on all levels if necessary. 

I'm not sure if tertiary was left of the list for a reason, or if anyone is using them?

I'd also like to se 'highway=unclassified' added to the the Regional list and 'highway=service' added to both withe examples of how you might use them.

My feeling is that the rating of roads really ought to be derived from their function and importance to getting places, rather than the size/state/maintained by etc. I would have the wording more like this:

 Motorway = freeways - no brainer
 Trunk = Major highways betwen capital and large cities 
 Primary = Main roads connecting more important population centres to each other and the trunk network.
 Secondary = The main roads connecting towns and villages, to each other and the Primary network.
 Tertiary = Other minor connecting and through roads
 Service = unnamed access roads
 unclassified = everything else

The Metro verion is pretty good, except for the missing Tertiary. 

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Brent.


____________________________________________________________
Brent Easton                       
Analyst/Programmer                               
University of Western Sydney                                   
Email: b.easton at uws.edu.au