[Talk-us] Proposed automated motorway_link mass edit

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    I'm new on this list but I assume that the problem I'm talking about 
has been widely discussed. Someone from the US alerted me to the fact 
that TIGER only has one type of road link which was imported as 
motorway_link, and therefore you have little bits of motorway_link 
sprinkled liberally across the US.

I propose to run a script that downgrades every motorway_link to the 
highest road type to which it is connected. A motorway_link that 
connects to a motorway remains unchanged; a motorway_link that connects 
a primary and a secondary road will become primary_link, one that 
connects two tracks (yes, these do exist) will become a track also, and 
everything in between.

(This will sometimes cause whole sets of interconnected motorway_links 
to be downgraded, like this: 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=25.7839&lon=-80.28898&zoom=17&layers=0B00FTFT)

Preliminary analysis shows that there would be roughly 28k changes 
across the whole US. I have prepared a full list of all proposed 
changes, arranged by state and county, here:

http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/us-motorway-link-downgrade/

I invite you to make some random checks (way IDs are linked to the 
openstreetmap.org browse page where you get to see the map context) to 
see whether my script does the right thing.

I would then run the script after the weekend if nobody has any 
objections. (Anything that is changed by hand between now and then will 
not be touched by the script.)

Let me know what you think.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"