[Talk-us] US highway tagging and relations

Jeff Barlow Jeff at WB6CSV.net
Sun Feb 7 21:35:33 GMT 2010


I'm pretty new to OSM. I've been making pretty good progress at
cleaning up the generally broken TIGER data imports in and near
Bend, OR, where I live.

While in this process I've tried to do something consistent and
sensible with the highway and ref tags for the local parts of US
20 and US 97. I've also attempted to place those segments into
the corresponding route relations.

I must say that I find this process pretty confusing and
frustrating. The available guidance, that I've managed to find in
the Wiki, is rather scattered and sometimes contradictory.

After reading several differing Wiki pages about the highway tag
I concluded that highway = primary made the most sense for the
local parts of these two roads. Now I see that someone with the
user name "dysteleologist" has changed much of US 20 NW of Bend
to highway = trunk. This seems inappropriate to me for a two lane
country road with stop signs.

I have no idea who this person is or how to contact them. I can
easily see how someone not familiar with central Oregon could be
confused about the nature of these roads and/or highway tagging
rules in general. Perhaps it is I who is confused about the
latter. <shrug>

So, how should I proceed?

Secondly, I find the JOSM relation editing functionality pretty
opaque and undocumented. The JOSM help buttons seem to be totally
nonfunctional. I have mostly guessed how to use it. I have no
clue what the little symbols in the right column of the member
list mean, nor what the order of those members is supposed to
represent, if anything. 

Is there some documentation for this stuff somewhere?

-- 
Jeff Barlow
WB6CSV




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