[Talk-us] REF tags for State Highways on ways

Richard Welty rwelty at averillpark.net
Fri Apr 8 20:58:56 BST 2011


On 4/8/11 3:35 PM, Nathan Mills wrote:
>
> Shouldn't the ref tag be an unambiguous reference to a given road in a 
> route network? Clearly, one should not put name=MI XX on a Michigan 
> state route (unless there is a road sign reading "MI XX"), but ref=MI 
> XX provides said unambiguous reference and can be easily translated 
> into the canonical name of the route. A name should go in the name 
> tag, anyway. Sometimes the name and ref are identical, sometimes 
> they're not.
>
> Seems to me that the ref tag is much less useful when it's ambiguous.
>
> Yes, we all ought to be using relations, but there's a lot of state 
> routes that don't yet have relations.
the ref tags on the ways, in their current form, get used directly by 
the rendering systems.
i wish that this weren't true, but it is, and we have to deal with that 
reality. we shouldn't
do off doing anything radical without a migration plan for the data 
consumers that makes
sense.

most of the state highway pages for individual states in the wiki 
specify a pattern for the
particular state, and many (most?) of these specify the postal code 
approach, or at least,
they did the last time i looked. this approach dpes permit a state that 
has its own
convention about what goes on the sign (like michigan) to set a 
different standard for
the state.

i know NE2 likes to make the prefix go away for state ref tags, but i 
have never agreed
with this practice. in particular, it's not great on the garmin displays 
from
maps made with mkgmap.

richard




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