[Talk-us] Highway Tagging Consensus to Improve OSM (and address some of 41 latitude's concerns)

[Alex Mauer]

On 10/23/2010 10:46 AM, Ian Dees wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Nathan Edgars II<neroute2 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> Because we're not in Europe? The common way to visually specify the
> difference between our roads is with shields. Every single nav product I've
> interacted with (Google Maps, MapQuest, Bing, Garmin, TomTom, and Google
> Navigation to name a few) display the blue/red shields for interstates,
> white with black outline shields for US routes, round white circles for
> county roads, etc. They don't display the prefix (but they may use them in
> routing).

Having the prefix in the ref does not preclude displaying it as a shield.

Much as it’s easier to store the long form and render an abbreviation, 
it’s easier to strip the prefix than to add it later.

Also, some people insist that certain states do absolutely need the 
prefix; in particular Michigan [1].

So dealing with having a prefix in the ref is pretty much guaranteed to 
be a requirement no matter what.

—Alex Mauer “hawke”

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Highway_System#Usage