[Talk-GB] highway=trunk Roads and Cycle Navigation

[David Woolley]

On 27/07/14 22:26, ianmspencer at gmail.com wrote:
> So there should be a clear tagging that is distinct for the meaning
> of “trunk (UK sense)” vs “trunk (International sense)

The logical conclusion of this would be that there would have to be a 
different tag for every jurisdiction.  In this context a jurisdiction 
could be a city, not just a country, as they all have the potential to 
change the rules independently of each other, at any time.  (Although I 
can't think of a good example for routing, at the moment, rules for 
highways differ from the rest of the county in London, e.g. there are 
more strict rules on pavement parking and blocking dropped kerbs.)

That would actually make life more difficult for routing software 
developers, as they would need to have a table listing all of the 
variants, even if most where the the same.

The current rules are set for the benefit of the many amateur mappers, 
not for the few professional software developers.

Even in areas where the rules require the use of a single international 
standard, namely phone numbers, the British amateur mappers regularly 
break the rule by giving national format numbers or even +44(0) format 
numbers, because that is how they are used to representing them, and 
because it is more difficult for part time mappers to learn and remember 
the rules than it should be for a professional software developer.

Of course commercial software development managers, when given something 
apparently free for cost, do tend not to budget for the cost of making 
it usable in their application.