[Talk-us] Alaska Highway AK-2 tagging

Bradley White theangrytomato at gmail.com
Tue Dec 17 13:40:49 UTC 2019


On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 4:53 PM <talk-us-request at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> On the West Coast, several important State highways are tagged as trunks
> even though they are not full expressways, because they are the main road
> for a large region. For example, see US 199, US 101, CA 99 and CA 299 on
> this map of far Northern California:

FWIW - I am the one who bumped each of these roads listed up to trunk
a year or two ago, and I have recently bumped them back down to
primary (what they were for years before IIRC) to remain consistent
with guidelines posted here:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging and
here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Road_classification

The lack of consistent highway tagging in the US is one of the biggest
sources of frustration with this project as a whole to me. IMO, the US
community needs to make a decision to *either*:

1. Use 'trunk' to mean "major cross-country highway" and orthogonalize
expressway constructions with its own 'expressway=*' tag, bump
'primary' to "minor cross-country highway/major regional highway",
'secondary' to "minor regional highway/major local road", etc...

Or:

2. Use 'trunk' to mean strictly "partially grade-separated limited
access divided highway" (with explicit instruction to not tag singular
or isolated interchanges as 'motorway')

The mixture of the two schemes that leans towards one or the other
depending on what part of the country you're in is inconsistent and
confusing to me, and judging by how many times we've gone in circles
about this on us-talk, others as well.



More information about the Talk-us mailing list