[OSM-talk-ie] FYI: N Route re-designations as Motorways

[Tom Pfeifer]

Richard Cantwell wrote:
> Good Afternoon All.
> 
> Just a quick heads-up, if you havent heard elsewhere, the Motorway
> re-designation scheme is coming into effect on August 28th.  Details here:
> http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0714/1224250638091.html

thanks!

We might need to check against the actual Roads Act in the statutebook
once that is being published.

The latest I could find was last year's:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2008/en/si/0279.html

However, the list apparently refers to a mix of roads that are
either completed, under construction or planned only.
If I look e.g. at "the N9 from Dublin to Waterford", many sections are
still a clay track currently.

Even last year's road act has a disclaimer that
"This Order applies only to high quality dual carriageways which were
already built, under construction or in planning..."

> It would be demonstrative of the power of crowdsourced data if we could
> ensure that our data gets updated that day to reflect the changes
> instantaneously.  

Since the roads are at a different stage, the practical side would
not be a single day of switching.

Many motorway sections under construction are in OSM already,
tagged as 'highway=construction' and 'construction=motorway'.
For dual carriageways already in use it would be simply a
change form 'highway=trunk' to 'highway=motorway' (and for the
link roads appropriately).

 > I imagine it will be a year or two before OSi re-issue the
> Discovery Series (1:50,000) with the changes shown.  It will also be
> interesting to see how long it takes TeleAtlas (and thus Google) to update
> their mapping.

Well they are terribly slow as we know. And while there is a 5th edition
of sheet 50 of the OS series, most of the country is still stuck with
the 2nd which misses lots of local development, bypasses and new R-roads.
Their electronic map is a bit more up-to-date, so they are just too
lazy to render new print versions.

Teleatlas has still many mistakes, R559 in Dingle my favourite one.
Up to last year it was even routed across the mountain!

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlehybrid&lon=-10.4589&lat=52.14379&zoom=15

Their tagging of road classifications is also inconsistent throughout
the country so that roads or the same class are rendered differently.

> I'm not too familiar with the tagging process, but might it be an option to
> prepare for this event by adding a tag to all of the sections of N Road
> which are about to change, so that they can be easily changed on the day
> itself?

I think this would be more effort in preparing such an extra tag.
Changing a road from N to M would cost only a minute, once the blue
signs appear in the field.

Tom