[talk-ph] Restarting discussion on road classifications

Tue Nov 3 09:35:11 UTC 2020

Hi

For unmaintained track road, they're obviously highway=track.

I mostly map in urban areas, where there are also many narrow residential
streets - those with no sidewalk and one lane lane with width narrower than
2.5-3 m, usually called "eskinita" (alley), and may or may not be passable
to a small car or tricycle. The once-common approach is to tag them as
highway=living_street (which has been appropriated to mean narrow streets
in the contexts of some developing countries including PH), but they can be
better tagged with highway=residential+narrow=yes/width= or
highway=service+service=alley if passable to cars, or highway=footway or
pedestrian if not. I mostly use service for those passable to cars, and
footway for those that don't (tagging them with pedestrian would be too
much given their size).

Other concerns that need to be addressed as well are the definition of
trunk, and the dividing line between primary and secondary. Trunk is
intended to be the tag for most 1 or 2-digit highways since the DPWH began
numbering highways in 2014 (as well as the roads that fill in the gaps),
but that tag has been also used to mark roads in between the build and
performance levels of a typical primary road and an expressway (e.g.
Commonwealth and Quezon Ave, EDSA, C-5, CSCR), and some even use it to mean
any critical-link highway regardless of traffic volume and official
designation, basing on the tree trunk analogy. As I mentioned in previous
threads, the existing scheme doesn't take in account urban-rural
differences, traffic and official designations, which is evident in the
often-ignored definitions of primary and secondar: primary is used on
every  road that connect all other towns - regardless of size -  even if
it's a provincial road that doesn't see a lot of traffic (as well as main
streets, or "caminos reales" parallel to a trunk following a route
bypassing  poblacion), and secondary gets relegated to the smaller but
high-traffic roads connecting 3 or more barangays with the poblacion or
city/town proper, usually within the same LGU. I hardly think primary is
the appropriate classification for the provincial road collecting Columbio
with Koronadal, the roads connecting Valencia with Dumaguete and Bacong, or
national roads within a small island only having municipalities with a
population no larger than 50K, so secondary to most local roads connecting
the barangays with each other and the poblacion in a municipality with a
population of <50K.

--TagaSanPedroAko

On Tue, Nov 3, 2020, 3:52 PM Glen Scott, <paverne at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Jherome,
>
> So to clarify (thinking of province application):
>
> Service would never be "connector" roads, e.g. a  500 m long dirt road
> leading to a group of houses - this would be "unclassified"? See sample
> below.
> What of "Unmaintained track road" ? I think the definition for this was
> for 4-wheel vehicles but not necessarily a standard passenger car - more
> tending towards a 4WD track. There are a lot of these!
> I assume Path (hiking and "mixed use trails in rural areas") includes
> tricycle use? I think there needs to be differentiation between the rural
> foot/bike/tricycle track and the wider "unmaintained track road'
> (trafficable by suitable 4-wheel vehicle).
>
> One of my concerns about (potential) overuse of "minor/unclassified" in
> rural areas is the map look - a wider road on the map can be interpreted as
> a better road (or a "decent" road) whereas many rural connectors are hard
> work. I'm guilty of using "Service Road" a lot for minor connectors, if
> only to get the map to look right (not over-represent the road). I think
> your rules allow that - we are talking about single lane roads; though it's
> a stretch to call a lot of them "residential" , e.g. if they lead to a
> farm... yes it may have a residence on it... but it's a farm. In the
> example below the "residential road" is surrounded by houses that I haven't
> added yet.
>
> [image: Screenshot 2020-11-03 172012.png]
>
> Cheers
> Glen Scott
>
> On Mon, 2 Nov 2020 at 20:51, Jherome Miguel <jheromemiguel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> In light of some suspicious edits by a "tongkho" who have been upgrading
>> road classes without providing reasons (usually in edits with the comment
>> "Modified"), I think we should continue discussions on classifying PH roads
>> once again and come up with a consensus.
>>
>> Again, here is my proposed definitions of each road class, since the last
>> discussions plus my additional suggestions:
>>
>> -Motorway: expressway
>> -Trunk: highways between cities with population of 100,000+, usually 1 to
>> 2-digit national roads; major roads resembling expressways (with U-turns,
>> overpasses/underpasses at major junctions, intersection closures, or
>> service roads for business/residential/local access)
>> -Primary: highways between small cities and large towns, usually 3-digit
>> national roads; major arteries
>> -Secondary: highways between smaller towns, usually being unnumbered
>> national roads and provincial roads; minor arteries
>> -Tertiary: roads between barangays; collector roads
>> -Unclassified: minor non-residential local roads
>> -Residential: residential streets
>> -Service: driveways, drive-thru lanes, parking lot roads,
>> eskinitas/alleys/ residential streets with width <2.5 m.
>> -Footway: walkways, sidewalks, "eskinita" not passable to cars or
>> tricycles
>> -Path: most unpaved trails (hiking trails, mixed-use trails in rural
>> areas)
>>
>> In this proposal, living_street is to be deprecated. It was adapted in
>> 2015, but contentions have been raised on its use in developing-world
>> contexts.
>>
>> In the 2015 scheme, trunk was intended to be used on 1 to 2-dight
>> national roads (i.e. the North-South Backbone or Rte 1 (N1), East-West
>> Laterals, and Other Roads of Strategic Importance) but some mappers use it
>> for roads that resemble expressways to some degree (e.g. Commonwealth Ave,
>> C5, CSCR) or any roads seen as major highways popularly even where it
>> should be tagged lower. The alternative definition of "expressway-like
>> road" is included in the proposal, but may or may not be included in the
>> final definition.
>>
>> --TagaSanPedroAko
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk-ph mailing list
>> talk-ph at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph
>>
>
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