[Talk-us] Tagging of county roads

[Nathan Edgars II]

> The 'parentheses' idea for tagging county roads would be mine. I used it in
> New Jersey, and then I applied it to county highways when doing fixup in
> Florida. For some strange reason, NE2 liked my system so much that he used
> it to tag county roads wherever he edited (including the whole of Florida)
> after that.
It wasn't so much that I preferred it to others as that I initially
saw it in use and thought it was the standard, and by the time I had
realized there were other standards in use elsewhere it had become the
standard in Florida. I'm not going to change over manually, because
that way lies typos. Instead I hope one day there's a single method of
tagging state and county roads that has enough consensus to implement
everywhere, and a semi-automated process can help convert.

It's worth remembering that US maps almost always place the number in
either the shield used for the road or a generic shape (usually circle
for state and rectangle for county, though that's the reverse of West
Virginia's signs). I don't know why there hasn't been any work on
rendering U.S. Highway and Interstate shields with a simple pattern
match of "US *" and "I *"; it doesn't need to be perfect, just a
reasonable outline. Hopefully, if this were ever done, it would
provide an impetus to standardize tagging of lower types so they too
could be rendered consistently.