[Talk-ca] Highways in Yukon

James Ewen ve6srv at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 16:23:50 GMT 2010


The Dempster should be tagged as a trunk highway from what I read and
understand. It is a very important highway (read only) headed north
out of the Yukon to Inuvik. Even if it has a gravel surface, it is
still the primary route. Top level highways get tagged as trunk.
Limited access highways get the motorway tag.

Tagging as such gives the highway the level of importance that it
should have designated for routing engine decisions and such.

The government designates specific routes as the top level priority
routes in areas. This designation means that the construction of the
road is designed to carry the heavier volume and mas of vehicles. It
also means that the route will receive more maintenance attention,
including pothole patching in the summer, and snow removal in the
winter.

By tagging as a higher importance roadway than others, this will
inform travellers not familiar with the area that this route is
probably the preferred route in the area.

This information will probably be conveyed to the user in a visual
manner, so yes, you would be tagging in a way which would affect the
rendering.

James
VE6SRV

On 3/17/10, Tim Francois <sk1ppy14 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> OK, so I came into some free time and completed the tracing of the
> Dempster Highway into OSM. Some points:
>
> 1) I have tagged it as a primary highway. It is, after all, called the
> Dempster Highway. Also, it is the only ground link to Inuvik, thus
> fairly important
> 2) I have tagged the surface as gravel.
> 3) I came across an unfinished Dempster Highway portion in Northern
> Yukon. This was tagged as a tertiary highway, and as part of the
> Trans-Canada Trail (ncn and ncn_ref attributes). I deleted the portions
> for which I had accurate GPS traces, and merged the two somewhere inside
> of NT, changing the highway to primary.
> 4) The entire Dempster Highway is now tagged as a Trans-Canada Trail.
> 5) I've also tagged as bicycle=yes, as a) I saw many cyclists and b) the
> tertiary route I came across also had this!
>
> I'll be adding in further POI's along the route when I can extract my
> diary files, and going on to update the rest of what we travelled in the
> summer.
>
> Question: Is there a Trans-Canada Trail relation I should have used?
> Couldn't find one...
>
> Tim
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Ewen <ve6srv at gmail.com>
> To: Talk-CA OpenStreetMap <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
> Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Highways in Yukon
> Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:59:25 -0700
>
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>
>>> One has to think about how the final map is going to be displayed.
>>
>> Now that is a little close to tagging for the renderer.
>
> Yes, but I've been chastised about that statement before... we are not
> tagging incorrectly to simply work around the renderer rules, but
> rather tagging as to road classification importance, which the
> renderer simply renders differently. If the data stored in the OSM
> database is not useful to the user, then it may as well not be
> included.
>
> Back to my GPS... the major roads in the TeleAtlas database cause
> routing problems. The routing routine will take me on a 350 km detour
> just to stay on highways, rather than a 200 km direct route on what it
> considers a major road. These major roads are indistinguishable from
> the highways as far as physical features are concerned. Speed limits
> are also identical.
>
> I'd prefer to have these major roads promoted to the same
> classification as the highways (in fact they are highways of the same
> classification as the others)... as a side effect, the renderer in the
> GPS would end up showing these roads that were previously not visible.
>
> Just because the renderer changes the display doesn't mean that I am
> specifically trying to misrepresent the road for the renderer.
>
> The renderers take the tags we use into account when deciding on how
> to display a way, so it is only appropriate that we also take into
> account how the renderer will display the tags we are deciding to use.
>
> It would be inappropriate to tag a stream as a coastline just to get
> it to show up on a wide area map... it is however appropriate in my
> opinion to tag an important major road (read only road) across a large
> expanse of territory at an appropriate classification level, despite
> what the rendering engines will do with it.
>
> The database and renderers are pretty much married to each other.
> Without the database, the renderers are useless. Without the
> renderers, it's pretty hard to visualize the data.
>
> James
> VE6SRV
>
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