[Talk-us] US highway classification

[Nathan Mills]

 On Sun, 29 May 2011 00:13:33 -0400, Anthony wrote:

> If you want to get people to tag "more than two lanes" and "a
> barely-existent shoulder", I think you'd have much more success
> creating tags for those features than convincing people that their
> area of the country isn't allowed to have any trunks.

 That's quite the misrepresentation of what I'm saying. Again, my point 
 is that trunk is much more useful (especially to people using rendered 
 mapnik tiles) if it is mainly restricted to four lane divided sorts of 
 roads here in the US. You can bring up all the corner cases you want, 
 but that doesn't change the fact that using trunk to describe roads that 
 can adequately handled with primary (for all purposes, no less!) means 
 that it's simply not possible to represent that with any tagging simple 
 enough to be reliably used everywhere.

 US-441 between St. Cloud and Yeehaw Junction could easily be trunk by 
 NE2's definition (and apparently yours, although you haven't really 
 indicated how exactly it should be used), but is also adequately 
 described by primary, and handily enough renders rather well.

 Yeah, we shouldn't tag specifically for the renderer, but we shouldn't 
 waste tags either. Nor should we avoid being mindful of how things are 
 rendered.

 Perhaps if you explain it very slowly, you can help me understand why 
 primary isn't emphatic enough in the cases that have been mentioned. Or 
 how it is that a routing engine would be confused by them being tagged 
 as primary rather than trunk (as many of them were for years before NE2 
 went off and changed them). As I said, I see those changes as making the 
 map less useful to someone reading it, not more useful.