[Talk-us] US highway classification

[Nathan Mills]

 On Sun, 29 May 2011 00:57:30 -0400, Anthony wrote:

>> That's quite the misrepresentation of what I'm saying.
>
> It was an exact quote.

 You may have heard of the concept of the "pull quote." It describes 
 using partial quotations to misrepresent someone else's position.

>> 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.
>
> And my point is 1) that you aren't going to convince people to do
> that; and 2) that if you could convince people to tag the number of
> lanes, you'd be better off having them use a tag which says the 
> number
> of lanes.

 I find it difficult to believe that you object so strenuously to making 
 it simple to tag one of the main things an end user of a road map 
 desires to know when looking at said map. Is it a practical "you can't 
 get people to agree to that" objection, or a "I don't think it should be 
 done that way" objection?

 Once again, there is, to most non-mapgeeks a class of road which is 
 less than a motorway, but better than all other classes of road. In my 
 part of the country, most people call it an expressway. This should be 
 easy to tag, so that the map is most useful to end users (and simple to 
 edit for casual editors, who you're almost certainly not going to 
 convince to tag width and lane count on every edit). Trunk seems to fit 
 that bill, and is used that way already in many areas. It was used that 
 way in a lot more areas until one specific editor decided he wanted to 
 edit roads in places he's never even been to use that designation. I 
 can't think of a downside to using it that way.

 What advantage does trunk have over primary in any of the mentioned 
 examples?