[Talk-ca] Proposed changes to road classification and related stuff

[Jherome Miguel]

I just had a look of the GTA at Magic Earth, but the case there is that
county/regional roads that were former provincial highways and tagged
primary use provincial highway shields. Also another thing is a circle is
used for regional/county roads and secondary highways. This is the case for
Magic Earth, but what about other renderers? Magic Earth does seems to use
a single rendering scheme across Canada that correlates with the underlying
OSM classification: shield for motorway, trunk, and primary, and slightly
squared-off oblong for secondary. If we should keep using numbers only for
ref=*, maybe ask them to improve their render, considering different sign
shapes are used across different provinces and the route relation should
dictate the sign shape. Most province use a shield for top-level provincial
highways (or all highways if there isn't a lower-level network like Alberta
501-986 highways, Manitoba provincial roads and Ontario secondary
highways), though others would have it in a different colour (Saskatchewan
shields are blue, Quebec green for ordinary provincial highways and
red-and-blue Interstate-like style for the autoroutes). An exception exists
for Nova Scotia as route numbers there use the "NS [number scheme]", which
follows the American way; Magic Earth doesn't render them (so are US state
route numbers), but I can point to them how those should be rendered.

By the way, for me, I would insist on adding a prefix (as in the American
way) as it will better deal with exceptional cases such as those downloaded
provincial highways now marked as county/regional roads, and the proposed
reclassifications push for it as it will uncouple (albeit partially)
official classification from the OSM classification. That still would need
an improvement to renderers though as an adaptation. Also something to
address is numbered routes posted in TCH shields (use same scheme as
regular provincial highways of [postal abbrev] [number] or use TCH
[number]).

Any other renderers that does Canadian highway numbers well aside from the
US-centric OSM render?

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 6:33 AM Kevin Farrugia <kevinfarrugia at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The relations should define the shield (network=*), not a prefix on the
> ref.  I think most of Ontario's highways and all of the province's freeways
> have the network tags present.
>
> Former provincial highways in Ontario shouldn't be an issue because
> they've been tagged with their post-download numbers and relevant network=*
> value.  The mass downloading of highways happened 6 years before OSM
> started, so they've always been under this classification.  Also highways
> doesn't necessarily mean freeways (400-Series) - some of these highways
> were 2 lane country roads at the time that could now be maintained by the
> growing suburban population and were no longer as relevant with the
> expansion of the 400-Series system.
>
> A Canadian-specific specification would be nice to have defined.  We've
> just sort of gone with the flow and kind of adjusted the American system
> and province-to-province differences always confuses discussions.
>
> -Kevin
>
> On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 at 23:59, Jherome Miguel <jheromemiguel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Magic Earth, the case is the shield rendered seem to depend on the
>> underlying classification (other renderers too?). So in the case of some
>> primaries in the GTA that are former provincial highways, not adding a
>> suffix such as CR or RR to distinguish it from provincial highways (this
>> being the likes of the 401, the 407 and the other 400-series highways)
>> would result in a provincial highway shield being rendered instead of a
>> regional or county road shield. Maybe also a consideration for provincial
>> highways that use TCH sign except in Ontario and Quebec.
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 9:40 PM Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 11:08 PM Jarek Piórkowski <jarek at piorkowski.ca>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Many renderers use the underlying classification to determine what
>>>> shield will be used
>>>
>>>
>>> Down here south of the border, we recently launched the
>>> openstreetmap-americana project, and we're the first open source map that
>>> has highway shields with full concurrency support on vector tiles. We do
>>> not use the highway classification to determine which shield is used.  We
>>> derive this information entirely from the list of road route relations that
>>> a way is a member of, as well as the network and ref tag on that route
>>> relation.  We ignore the ref tag on ways entirely for the purpose of
>>> generating shields.
>>>
>>> (no, we haven't implemented Canada highway shields yet.  Yes, we want to)
>>>
>>> [1] https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana
>>>
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