[Talk-us] Interstate Highways Relations List

[Greg Troxel]

Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> writes:

> On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 16:55 -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
>> Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>> >   It contains all you need to pick the correct sign. But you need the  
>> > whole knowledge about signs for all states, county ...
>> > as an example California uses different signs for US routes but the  
>> > same for interstates.
>> 
>> Well, if the US ones are different, the Interstate ones are different
>> for the same reason based on what i've seen in Northern California on
>> I-5, US-199 and US-101:  California's egotistical enough to put it's
>> name on all route markers regardless of size.  "Interstate California 5,
>> US California 199", etc.
>
> network=us_us would be better than nothing for US 101 and US 199, in my
> opinion.  But if the local expert wants them to be rendered "right" why
> not use network=us_us_ca ?  US network, US Route, California variant,
> and create a us_us_ca.png?    
>
> Likewise, network=us_i_ca for the Interstate signs.
>
> Should work for Route 66 historic signs too.  network=us_us_historic

I'm in danger of spending more time flaming than fixing the map, but
have always been interested in the database schema aspect of OSM.
Evolving tags is messier than a designed scheme, but I see the wisdom of
how it avoids the wrong design persisting.  Still, I think it may make
sense to try to design each microfeature.

The US highways in California are really (I think) regular US highways,
but CA uses a different kind of sign.  So tagging then us_us_ca seems
again like tagging for the renderer.  This is sort of OK, perhaps, but
it bothers me perhaps because it's doing so in a denormalized way.
Database users that care if something is a US highway will then have to
have a list of tags and check against that set.

An alternative would be to have a shield hint tag, like

  shield_flavor=us_ca

added, leaving network=us_i.  Then users that don't care about sign
variants jus see us highways, and renderers get their hints.  Or perhaps
renderers know that a highway is in CA.  Or maybe the shield_flavor is
needed because we're trying to match each road's actual signs, and they
aren't consistent.  Or maybe it's shield_flavour.

For Route 66, I'm not clear on whether it is a historic route and the
current legal route is elsewhere.  If so, the the historic designation is
part of the actual designation, not a rendering hint.

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