[Talk-us] Use of highway=tertiary

[Apollinaris Schoell]

On 22 Feb 2010, at 23:39 , Stellan Lagerstrom wrote:

> Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>> did someone contact this user? any feedback?
>> he/she reverted the whole revert again. 
>> Will try to revert some of the worst areas for now but can't spend to much time on this.
>> 
>> 
> We had a brief exchange of emails through the OSM site. I wondered why
> so much tertiary, got the answer:
> 
> "My interpretation is that any fully paved road, with hard shoulders,
> gutters, enough width for parking on both sides plus two traffic lanes
> ...  is tertiary. I except any road which is a dead end or merely a loop."
> 

o boy, a a newbie who reads a bit wiki and adds the own interpretation and then changes what others did over month, and years without any consultation.

> I replied we did not tag quite like that. He/she retorted that then we
> were doing it wrong, and he/she had no problem with being different.

pretty arrogant, really what we need in a community project

> "There are areas of the US which have a road hierarchy where
> "residential" makes sense and is even consistent with the actual UK
> model. I have yet to see anything in the documentation or the talk pages
> of the wiki which justifies such a drastic departure. "
> 
> I said we should take it to the wiki since it is a community project,
> and there we left it...
> 
> Unfortunately, the wiki contains a lot of different ideas on how to tag
> U.S. roads. It might be a good topic for a session at a U.S. SOTM to
> hammer out some clear and easy-to-apply standards.

this isn't just a U.S. problem. road classification is quite tricky and there has been lot of discussions everywhere. 
In the meantime there is a broad consensus that (relative) importance and physical layout are primary keys for classification.
Standards? no way there is simply no way. some residential/service/tertiary roads in Santa Clara have better physical characteristics than I 80 near Donner pass. Still it is clear to anyone that I 80 is a motorway. Just tracing from Yahoo will yield entirely wrong data. 
mk408 changeset comment "reclass, de-abbrev, adjust based on yahoo ae" tells it all. an armchair mapper without knowledge of the reality out there.


> 
> /Stellan
>