[Talk-us] Use of ref-tag on state highways

[Toby Murray]

To add some hard numbers to this discussion, here is a very rough
count although I'm not entirely sure what it means. I downloaded all
ways with a ref tag in the lower 48 states and did some filtering.
Basically I took the first split in awk (so everything from the
beginning to the first space if there is a space, otherwise it just
gets everything) and sorted and counted it. So all ways with ref="KS
XX" will show up in the "KS" total. Anything with "K-XX" will show up
by itself and so isn't in the summary here.

Obviously this is very rough. Any ways with multiple refs (with a ;
delimiter) aren't taken into account and I'm sure there are all kinds
of other things lurking in the data. But it's... well... something :)

These are all the values with 500 or more occurrences:

http://pastebin.com/REd5nLfQ

Looks like "SR" and "CR" are the most used behind "I" and "US" but
there are a lot of state postal code abbreviations that add up to over
80,000 which is double the total for "SR"

This was just 5 minutes of tinkering at a bash prompt, for whatever it is worth.

Toby