[Talk-ca] Route reference tagging: time for change?

Sun Jul 4 17:55:23 UTC 2021

Lors des discussions précédentes, nous avons clairement indiqué que nous ne voulions pas ajouter de préfixes aux noms et références de route. Et je suis d'accord avec les autres. Cela doit rester ainsi.

Pour les notions de propriétaire ou opèrateur, les clés ownwer et operator peuvent être utilisées. Mais nous devons nous demander s'il est utile de systématiquement ajouter une telle information et comment il serait facile d'identifier quelles routes d'une municipalité sont la propriété de la province ou autre instance. 
Pierre 

    Le dimanche 4 juillet 2021 12 h 21 min 49 s UTC−4, Andrew Deng via Talk-ca <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org> a écrit :  

 I agree with the proposal. It makes it easier to identify which routes are provincially-owned, which are regional/county roads, and which ones are municipal. For example, with the current no-prefix tagging, one would have no idea that York Regional Road 7 in Markham becomes Ontario Highway 7 east of Reesor Road, and a person would have to look online to websites such as https://thekingshighway.ca/ in order to accurately determine where the provincial part of the highway starts. In another example, in Milton Ontario, there is a road called Regional Road 25, and I hear 680news traffic reports routinely mistakenly call it Highway 25 (even though it had been downloaded from the province to the region for years now). 
As for the prefix not being on the signs, US Route signs also do not have US- prefix on their shields, nor do many state route shields either. So I don't understand the argument there.
To answer the one about Hamilton: I know that Sudbury refers to theirs as "Municipal Road X", so perhaps that would be the same with Hamilton? 

--

Andrew Deng

    On Sunday, July 4, 2021, 11:49:59 a.m. EDT, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:  

 Greetings from south of the border.
I've been doing considerable work recently to improve vector tile renderings for highway shields and highway concurrencies (multiple routes on the same route).  You can see some of the ongoing work on an open GitHub ticket[1] and related issues in OpenMapTiles.  We've made a lot of progress recently, and accurate highway shield rendering is an important rendering concern in the US mapping community; I assume Canada is similar in that regard.
(the descriptions below apply to OMT vector tiles, other renderers may differ).
The first thing I should note is that, in OMT, if a way is a member of a route relation (with a network and ref set on the route relation), whatever is in each way's ref field is completely ignored in favor of what's in the route relation.  So, as long as route relations are established, it really doesn't matter what's in the way's ref tag.  There has been some discussion of using the way ref tags for determining the order of routes in a highway concurrency, but that's somewhat hypothetical as the format of indicating concurrent route refs isn't standard and requires fuzzy matching.
Additionally, if there are unsigned routes or portions of routes (which are definitely a thing in the US, not sure about Canada), it's really helpful to put unsigned_ref tags on the ways and/or relations so that a future renderer can suppress rendering of shields for these routes.  Nothing parses these unsigned routes yet, but it's something we're talking about and hope to have a solution for.
Lastly, I'd like to point out the current OpenMapTiles code for determining whether a route is part of the Trans-Canada network is tremendously complex, and includes name matching as well as checks for specific refs:https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles/blob/1b0b1fd12131167904b61628c1ea403359f4a6e7/layers/transportation_name/update_route_member.sql#L36-L47

I'm not sure if the current state of Canadian route tagging has changed since that code was written, but it seems to indicate significant inconsistencies in route network tagging.  Be aware that changes to how routes are tagged DOES impact renderers and those changes should be advertised and hopefully documented somewhere for renderer authors.
In short: anything that makes route / network / ref tagging consistent is really helpful to renderers in providing clear rules, with accurate and consistent route networks being the most important piece of data.
Significant discussion on highway shield rendering and the ongoing OpenMapTiles work is happening on the OSM US Slack, channel #american-map-style.
[1] https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles/issues/1128
On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 2:52 AM Jherome Miguel <jheromemiguel at gmail.com> wrote:

I’ve been considering a major change to the way we tag highway ref= values, trying to follow the lead with our neighbours stateside.Currently practice has been to use bare route numbers except in Manitoba, where the number is preceded by PTH, PR or Route depending on type of route; for the data user’s end, the rendered shield is generally dependent on the tagged classification of the road (mostly tied to the road’s official classification by the provincial or territorial transportation ministry), the province or territory, and the network tag in the route’s relation.

The proposal for route numbers is, by type of road:- For provincial and territorial highways, add province/territory postal abbreviation before number (e.g. AB 2 for Alberta Highway 2, ON 401 for Ontario Highway 401, BC 5 for BC Highway 5, NS 101 for Nova Scotia Highway 5), except perhaps Manitoba provincial highways (can keep ref=* with PTH for provincial trunk highways including the Trans-Canada and the Yellowhead, and PR for provincial roads). This includes routes with special shields different from provincial or territorial towns standard designs (e.g. the TransCan, BC Highway 5 as the South Yellowhead, the Mackenzie Highway). The QEW will remain as it is. For highways forming the TransCan, it can be tagged as a second ref= value, as TCH.- For Ontario regional and county roads, add CR or RR before number depending on the type of municipality the road is in.- For Toronto expressways (the Gardiner, the Allen, the DVP), there will be no changes.- For Winnipeg city routes, there will be no changes.
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