[Talk-us] United States Roadway Classification Guidelines

[Ian Dees]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> We have those tags: lanes=*, width=*, etc. But there's no "on the
> >> ground" definition of importance,
> >
> > Yes there is. It's the highway= tag.
> Please explain?
>

I guess you need to define what you meant by "importance".


> > Yes there is. "Tagging for the renderers" is the first thing people in
> OSM
> > will tell you *not* to do.
> That's tagging *incorrectly* for the renderer that you don't do.
>

My point is that there should be no tagging for renderers of any kind:
"correct" or "incorrect".


> > That is incorrect. There is a relatively consistent government-assigned
> > classification system. It has been linked to several times on this list
> > (most recently by the originator of this thread).
> Can you give a link to it?
>

I'm on my cellphone, so I can't find it right away, but here's an example I
found in the first page of Googling I did:
http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/23000/23100/23121/09RoadFunction.pdf


>
> > The problem is that the
> > European community has decided that the highway tags are shorthand for
> > physical qualities that usually only exist in Europe.
> I don't know about other countries, but in the UK the classification
> has nothing to do with physical qualities; it's tied to a consistent
> importance-based system assigned by the government.
>

I didn't say anything about the UK government classification system. I was
referring to the OSM highway tags (tertiary, secondary, primary, trunk,
etc.). Those terms are specific to the UK and are shorthand for physical
qualities that usually only exist in UK or Europe.


>
> > The suggestion I made
> > in my first reply to this thread was that we use a separate tag to
> describe
> > what the US government calls the way. This would allow us to make an
> > interstate-only road map like the one that Google shows you or that you
> can
> > obtain in paper from your state government.
>
> And what do you do for all the not-so-major roads that the US
> government doesn't care about (anything not an Interstate or on the
> National Highway System)?
>

Those roads don't have a government classification, so they don't get a
"classification" (or whatever it should be called) tag.
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