[Talk-us] US Route Tagging With Relations

[Alan Brown]

A couple thoughts:

1)  Commercial data providers have use a "route type" parameter that designates something as an Interstate, Federal Highway, State Highway, County Road, or Farm-to-Market road.  This code does not distinguish between states; all state highways have the same "route type".  General practice is to use the same highway shield for all states; you don't get the "Beehive" sign for  Utah. :)

This is an opportunity for OSM to distinguish itself; if local users contribute Highway signs from their region - down to very specialized signs for something like "Kettle Moraine Scenic Route" in Southeast Wisconsin - they'll have something the commercial vendors don't provide.  However, there should be something clearly identify a route as a state, county/parish, farm-to-market road/ whatever, so a default shield could be picked.

2)  I don't like the "is_in" approach - the "US:CA" approach seems to offer all the appropriate information in the same place.  However, if there was a way to explicitly state that this is a state route, that would help in the situation mentioned above.

3)  There should be a place for people to contribute highway shields - as metadata.  Respecifying highway shields for every route would be prone to omissions.  In the case of "Kettle Moraine Scenic Route" - it's so specialized, it may make sense to apply the sign to the route itself.  But having a place to submit a library of highway shields as metadata - that would be good.




________________________________
From: Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com>
To: Talk-us <talk-us at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 7:50:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] US Route Tagging With Relations

Chris,


Thanks for putting up that table.  Looks great.  I have two suggestions:

I think the network identifiers should be simpler. What about this scheme? 
 
Interstate = Interstate signed highway system
US = US signed highway system
[state abbr.] = State signed highway system

TX = Texas
CA = California
OR = Oregon
etc...

County or other networks should just be the county name or TN Secondary, etc...


To avoid duplicate network values (CA stands for California and Canada) we can use the "is_in" key the same way it is used for place names.  So a California route relation would have these tags:

network: CA
is_in: United States


Or a county road system in california:

network: Marin Co
is_in: California, United States


This way we don't clutter up the network name, but we keep the differentiating information.

My other suggestion is that I don't thing the symbol key is necessary.  I think the renderers should be able to assign a symbol based on the network and is_in tags once they get to that stage.  This way they symbols will stay more consistent and we won't get US highway shields that look slightly different throughout the country.

Thoughts?

Zeke
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