[Talk-us] US Route Tagging With Relations

[Zeke Farwell]

Yeah we're getting a little ahead of ourselves with the shields.  The first
step is tagging the highways in a standard scheme which would give a
renderer sufficient data to draw shields.  Then someone has to actually
build a renderer that draws the shields.  Thats a whole other can of worms.

I don't think that the Slippy Map on openstreetmap.org will ever draw custom
shields beyond blue interstate shields, white US highway shields, and white
ovals for state routes.  I think it would be great to have a map with custom
shields for every state.  What we need for that to happen is someone to set
up a US based Open Street Map renderer.  In addition to custom shields, the
highway colors could be drawn in more US centric way:  varying shades of
red, orange, and yellow with green reserved for toll roads.  I think this
would really help people in the US get involved with OSM because the map
would look more familiar to them.  The main slippy map is never going to do
this though, because it is international.


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.


The "UC:CA" approach does offer all the appropriate information in the same
place.  I don't think that is necessarily desirable though.  For example,
Vermont Route 30 is never called  US Vermont Route 30.  The network is just
Vermont, not United States: Vermont.  This is even more true for county
roads.  If Windham county in Vermont had it's own numbered routes one would
not call a route "United States, Vermont, Windham County Route 10".  In
short, I like the "is_in" approach because keeps the network name simple.

I'd rather not have to bother with the "is_in" tag at all.  For someone
mapping there is no confusion as to whether a highway is Canadian Route 10
or California Route 10 (unless they are really bad at geography), but I
suppose this could get confusing for the renderers.  Ideally, I would say a
renderer should be smart enough to know where the US Canada boundary is and
to render routes tagged with "network: CA"  as a California route when in
the US, and as a Canada route when in Canada.  I don't know the details of
how the renderers work though.


Zeke
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