[Talk-us] note to armchair mappers about NYS routes & ref tags

[Richard Welty]

i have spotted what appears to be an armchair mapper making an inappropriate
set of edits to some NYS routes this past summer; i have sent the mapper
a note
through the OSM message system but thought this could use a broader
audience,
so that certain inappropriate ref tag settings _don't_ get made.

NY state has a not-quite-secret route numbering system called reference
routes.
these routes have numbers in the 900 range, and have a single character
suffix.
Examples are 910F, 914V and so forth and so on.

these route numbers never, with 4 well documented exceptions, _never_
appear on
conventional highway signage (the exceptions are 961F, 962J, 990L and 990V).

an example of incorrectly setting a ref tag to 910F is here:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/68519517

there are no black-and-white NYS route signs carrying the number 910F, so
convention dictates that if these designations are to be tagged at all, it
should be in unsigned_ref or other similar tag.

i haven't heard back from the mapper who added these yet, but am giving it
a little more time before i go and fix this up myself.

so anyway, it's fun to learn about things like this numbering system, but
please don't screw up the map by putting these numbers in the ref tags.
they don't belong there.

for anyone who cares, the entire list of these numbers appears here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reference_routes_in_New_York

richard

-- 
rwelty at averillpark.net
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