[Talk-us] proposed first principles for United States road tagging

[David ``Smith'']

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 10:45 AM, McGuire, Matthew
<Matt.McGuire at metc.state.mn.us> wrote:
> The US Census Feature Class Code has descriptions of most types types of roads.
> This would at least tie it to an existing US standard.
>
> http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/appendxe.asc
>
> This designation exists in many OSM roads tagged with TIGER:CFCC. However most roads could definitely use some refinement. We could strip the TIGER from the tag to just cfcc then refine it from there.

The original TIGER import did in fact use CFCCs to determine highway
class.  It produced values of motorway, motorway_link, primary,
secondary, and residential.  We've been refining that for 3 years now.
 The problem is, this comes from the Census Bureau.  They really don't
care about a road's functional importance.  There are CFCCs for many
other things besides roads.  And the few CFCCs assigned for road
features are essentially based on whether the road is an Interstate, a
US route, or a State Route, which doesn't correlate well with a road's
functional classification.

What's more useful is the Highway Functional Classification System.
The name sounds like what we want to do.  And it's from the Federal
Highway Administration, so they actually care about roads.  I've also
put forward guidelines for translating HFCS to OSM.
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:United_States_roads_tagging#Discussion>
(Sort of buried in a wall of text.  I should probably repost those
guidelines in my userspace.)

-- 
David "Smith"
a.k.a. Vid the Kid
a.k.a. Bír'd'in

Does this font make me look fat?