[Talk-us] Another road classification disagreement (this time with HFCS in Kansas)

[Paul Johnson]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 12:58 PM, Richie Kennedy <richiekennedy56 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm mostly with you on this, except, for the four lower classes, which
>> generally speaking the following observations with tagging have been true:
>>
>
> Interstate/Freeway (only): Motorway
>> Expressway (only): Trunk
>>
>
> As I read the wiki, there are multiple wiki sections (not just the HFCS
> page) that indicate that the trunk tag is *NOT* exclusively applied to
> limited access roads. e.g. the "US" entry in this table --
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtrunk#International_equivalence
>
> Surface expressway: A relatively high-speed divided road (at least 40 MPH
> with a barrier or median separating each direction of traffic), with a
> limited amount of intersections and driveways; **or** a major intercity
> highway. This includes many U.S. Highways (that do not parallel an
> Interstate) and some state highways.
>

Nice catch, that "or" statement should be removed.  It was added by
unilaterally by NE2 back in November 2012, when he was trying to ret-con a
nationwide, undiscussed and unilateral automated edit flipping 100% of
anything with ref=*US* to trunk if it wasn't already a motorway by changing
every wiki page discussing US usage of trunks (hence why it's such a PITA
tag now).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag%3Ahighway%3Dtrunk&diff=833939&oldid=833922
 See also multiple megabytes of threads about this around the same time in
talk-us and tagging's archives, and a contributing factor as to why he's no
longer with the project.


> [emphasis added]
>
> Generally speaking, that's the TL;DR of
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging
>>
>
> To me, "unpaved" includes gravel surfaced roads (which is the predominant
> surface type of non-state highways in rural Kansas). I'm not inclined to
> mark every gravel road in Kansas as 'track'


I'm not necessarily for or against doing so without having personal
experience in the area in particular, this is a NP-complete problem right
now.  Much of the poorly graded and gravelled ones in southern Kansas
(really roughly the 15 or 20 southernmost sections save for a few miles
around some of the moderately sized towns come to mind as potential track
candidates, south to at least the Canadian River from the Rockies to the
Ozarks.  In the unpaved county roads, seems like you've got a badly mapped
mixed bag of once-graded and gravelled section lines that haven't seen a
county truck since the commissioner that lived out there died 20 years ago,
to graded and packed gravel (and indistinguishable from a faded aging
asphalt road of far worse quality), to "did they just throw this at a map
and see what can climb this cliff?" washed-out wannabe cattle trails that
people still have to get in and out on, so it's going to take some elbow
grease to classify the pick-up sticks of "residential" TIGER left behind
and is still on revision=1.  Bonus is the aerials aren't quite high enough
resolution to tell what's going on without some on-the-ground context or a
feel for the area to piece the rest of it together (we're not talking about
Salinas, Wichita, Bartlesville or Woodward metro after all).  Mapping the
Big Empty is hard and takes a decent amount of exploration in really rural
places.  Which isn't to say it shouldn't be done, just that timeliness is
probably going to be an issue for a long time to come, partly in due to the
lack of affordable internet access at any speed in much of these locations
as well.
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