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

[Andrew Sawyer]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 16:08, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> Richard Welty wrote:
>
> > probably a better example are the unpaved state highways that may be
> found
> > in some parts of New Hampshire. they do have signage, are they secondary
> > because they're state highways?
>
> I would say so.  There's the "surface" tag, too...  surface=gravel,
> surface=unpaved...
>
> Not to be super technical, but in New Hampshire all public roads are state
highways. The distinction you are likely referencing is the numbered State
routes which are maintained by NH DOT (except some city/town centers) and
known as the New Hampshire Highway System.

A question that I have is whether or not NH Routes should ever be listed as
Primary or Tertiary? I know in Mass its been done using a functional usage
criteria, whereas I have used the US Routes get to be Primary, NH Routes
Secondary and routes that connect town centers that aren't the other two are
tertiary. I know this is the debate that we are having, but it would seem
that either we leave it to regions or states to decide or try a one size
fits all approach based off the British system which doesn't seem to match
up very well (at least terminology wise) with the US and its intricacies.

There seem to be two major groups of roads: limited access and everything
else. Within those groups there are variations that at some level get
tedious in distinguishing between various classifications that depend on
routing/lanes/max speed. In some respects a standard is important, but it
has to describe and differentiate between the roads. I think that a regional
approach, especially in NE, would be best while maintaining some uniformity
across the US and World. I would propose more, but I find it difficult given
the current structure. It would seem that there be two major tagging
classifications could dominate the tagging:
1. administrative (coming from the authorities over it - route numbers,
administrative designations of classification, etc.)
2. functional (coming from actual usage criteria, like number of lanes,
width, etc)

The first is going to be easier to tag and edit, whereas the latter is going
to be more intensive with reviewing official GIS data and personal
observations. Just some thoughts. I don't propose to reinvent the wheel,
maybe this can be accomplished with Relations or current tagging and leave
people quibbling over colors to renders?

Some thoughts and my two cents.

Andrew Sawyer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20100307/9f48bba4/attachment.html>