[talk-au] Highway classifications

[John Smith]

On 14 June 2010 11:30, Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, I think it boils down to this: make it secondary if
> it's more important than nearby tertiary roads, and make it tertiary
> if it's less important than nearby secondary roads. Iterate.

That seems to be circular reasoning, it's also bound to send the tag
what's on the ground crowd into a spin...

Motorways are pretty obvious, although Liz has some ideas here about
what constitutes a motorway with respect to some rural areas that are
dual carriage way but have directly connected side roads, some even
crossing over both directions of traffic flow, in her opinion this
makes them trunks rather than motorway. Or do we use road planning
oganisations that label a road way as freeway, motorway, etc as being
a motorway?

So then what makes a trunk a trunk? dual carriage way? volume of traffic?

Then onto primary, obviously they aren't as well constructed or have
the highway speeds as high as trunk or motorways, but they still would
have a relatively high flow of traffic.

Then onto secondary, these are lower than primary, but as you point
out most of these classifications are relative to the immediate
vacinity, and to a lesser degree to the rest of the country or what
others have become accustomed to on other maps.

Finally tertiary, residential and unclassified, the latter of those 3
gets used differently in Europe than it does Australia and it'd be
nice to make this a little less ambiguous by the use of highway=rural
and highway=minor or something similar.