[Talk-us] Editing_Standards_and_Conventions for US Interstate highways

[Greg Troxel]

"Mike N." <niceman at att.net> writes:

> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/North_Carolina#Interstate_Highways
>
>   Would be a good start.  Does it make sense to have a national convention 
> for Interstate Highway editing?   Those conventions would seem to apply to 
> the whole US when updated for Relations.

Yes, I think we should be consistent across the US.

>   Some Interstate questions in general -
>
>  Is there any use for the 'nat_ref' tag since a relation seems to be a 
> better representation of the Nationally Referenced function?
>  Should roles for direction be used when the interstate signing convention 
> include the direction?

I suppose it should.  In Mass you can be on 128 south and 93 north,
going east.  This is confusing to people from away, and it might help to
display it.

>   Should interstate exits be included as part of the routing relation?

I would say not; the exits are in my view not part of the highway proper.

>  Rest area -
>      Should the entrance and exit ramps be marked as motorway_link , while 
> the rest stop streets be marked as type 'service' - or are all marked as 
> 'service'?

motorway_link seems to be to be what is intended for entrance and exit
ramps - to get you on/off the road to another road.  This usage should
be consistent worldwide.

For rest stops, highway=service makes sense.

>     Should the Rest stop roads in general be included as part of the 
> interstate route relation?

Again I'd have to say that the rest areas and their roads are not part
of the interstate proper.  In the overall relation they seem like
clutter.  They should not inherit the tags of the relation.

>  Relations - general
>
>     When does adding a relation to a road create a more useful map?
>     What about for local primary and secondary roads?
>     For a 2 mile "Interstate Spur"?

The point of relations seems to be to associate tags with multiple ways,
either because there are multiple ways because other tags change, or
because a way is part of multiple routes.  It seems that a road that
goes for any distance and has a name/# would be better off with a
relation for the long-distance data.

At some point this gets silly - consider two ways that are both SR5.
Perhaps duplicated tags are ok.  But a relation with SR5 on it and both
ways in it, with no SR tags on the ways seems cleaner.  I feel like
we're about to define a 'relation normal form', giving recommended
transformations to be fully relationalized, and perhaps that is where we
should go.  But this is not a US-only issue.

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