[Talk-us] United States Roadway Classification Guidelines

[Ian Dees]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> > 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.
>
> Huh? Those highway classification tags (other than tertiary) are used
> for classifications that the UK government has made:
> *trunk: primary route network
> *primary: other A roads
> *secondary: B roads
>

So you agree with me.


> >
> >>
> >> > 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.
> >
> Have fun convincing anybody that anything not on the NHS is unclassified.
>

They can still be tagged with other things, but they shouldn't be tagged
with NHS tags.
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