[Talk-us] US highway classification

[Anthony]

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Nathan Mills <nathan at nwacg.net> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I have.

>> 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.

Good, because I don't.

> 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?

It's both.  I don't think you are going to convince people to base the
trunk tag on the number of lanes, and I don't think we should use the
term trunk to tag the fact that a road has four lanes.

> 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).

I agree.

> Trunk seems to fit that bill, and is used that way already in many areas.

Here I disagree.  The problem with using trunk to represent the class
of road, and primary to represent the most important non-motorway, is
that you can't tag something trunk *and* primary.

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

It is rendered at z5.