[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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