[Talk-us] State highway refs (was Re: New I.D Feature)

[Tod Fitch]

On Dec 3, 2014, at 4:33 AM, Minh Nguyen wrote:

> If we standardize all states on the state abbreviations, software like Nominatim would need special cases to translate from e.g. "100 SR 123, Red Lion" (what a typical user would input based on a business listing) to "100, OH 123, Red Lion, Warren County, Ohio". Routers would need to translate in the other direction, because street signs are often limited to plain text. If someone's in unfamiliar territory and their GPS says "turn left on Texas 99" but they see "SH-99" on a blade sign [6], maybe that could make them hesitate and miss a turn?
> 

Shouldn't the wording on the "blade sign" be tagged by name=*? rather than being in the ref tag at all? Around here it is possible for one numbered highway to by different names in different places. In rural areas and small towns the signs at intersections might have "HWY 49" on them and the addresses be of the form "1234 North Highway 49" while in bigger towns that same numbered route might have a different name like "Center Street" (all made up examples). I hope that the GPS would use the value in the name tag rather than the ref tag as the primary way of displaying directions, or like OsmAnd, give something like "CA 49 - Center Street" by concatenating the value in the ref and name tags.

For what it is worth, California has a policy of avoiding duplicate highway numbers between the state, US and Interstate highway systems. As I understand it, that policy and the renumbering that accompanied it occurred in the 1960s. So if highway 50 is specified there is no ambiguity, it will be US 50 as there is no CA50. There are some weird but understandable exceptions like the eastern most section of "The 210" freeway in the greater LA metro area which apparently has not been accepted into the Interstate system. So it is labeled as CA210 but is otherwise indistinguishable from the much longer western portion labeled as I-210. Near as I can tell, for the locals and possibly for CalTrans too it is all simply "The 210".