[OSM-talk-be] Road status & width (was: Humbeeksesteenweg tertiary or secondary road ?)

[Ben Laenen]

On Monday 10 March 2014 17:48:06 André Pirard wrote:
> According to IGN/NGI and the reasoning below, Benedestraat N211a is
> (officially) a secondary road.
> 
> The first question is; what is a "primary/secondary/tertiary road?".
> And why is it useful to know? To make better GPS routing?

The current conventions are written more or less down here 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Conventions/Highways 
(but the bit written after tertiary about suffix letters isn't really correct, 
and the bit on trunk roads could be changed a bit to include express roads 
that aren't motorroads but don't allow pedestrians and cyclists)

So we're using the road numbers to decide on secondary/primary. These rules 
are up for debate but the problem is getting better definitions so we don't 
risk getting into a discussion for every possible road where one person would 
classify a road primary, while another one thinks it's secondary etc. (*)

The current rules aren't perfect but they generally give maps that are 
satisfactory, since all important roads are managed by our regional government 
and thus have road numbers, and thus are at least secondary.

Ben


(*) one other option could be possible: using the official 
primary/secondary/local status, but we don't have access to this data.