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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> Anthony wrote:
> > Yeah.  Motorway is simple.  A road designated exclusively for motor
> > vehicles.  The rest should probably be handled on a state by state basis.
> > Europe doesn't have a single tagging scheme for all of its states.  Why
> > should the US?
>
> Perhaps we should be working more towards worldwide consistency.


When objectively describing the features on the ground, sure.  But
primary/secondary/tertiary don't do that.

If we want to achieve worldwide consistency, we should throw
primary/secondary/tertiary out the window, and replace them with objective
facts.  I don't see that happening though, so the next best solution is to
come up with objective definitions on a state by state basis.  Possibly even
more locally than that in some cases.  But certainly at least on a state by
state basis, since traffic laws are defined on a state by state basis.

I don't know about you, but I don't expect the same map to work
> differently in the UK than it does in Canada, or in Canada
> differently from the US.  So why should the same map work
> differently in Oregon than it does New York or Washington?


I'm not sure what you mean by "work differently".  The laws of different
states are different, so the information which needs to be presented by the
map is different.  The maps, therefore, are going to be different.  I
wouldn't "expect the same map to work differently" in different places,
because I wouldn't "expect the same map" in different places.
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