[Talk-us] US Route Tagging With Relations

[Karl Newman]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>

I've never liked the is_in tag. It seems like a poorly-thought-out kludge,
because the contents are not strictly defined, so it's useless for automated
parsing. Instead of having the state name in the network tag, why not have
network=us_county, state=CA, county=Marin, operator=Marin County, CA or
something like that. The operator tag seems appropriate here, but I'm not
sure about the contents. Alternate values for network could be
us_interstate, us_highway or us_state. The interstate modifier (alternate,
business, etc.) could go into a interstate_modifier tag.

Karl
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