[Talk-us] Alaska Highway AK-2 tagging

[Greg Troxel]

Bradley White <theangrytomato at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Agreed.  I think option 2 is the right path.  primary used to mean
important long-distance route, before people started calling local roads
primary.

Long term, it would be nice to separate these notions and have some
highway:importance key for that, and leave the road type notion that
separates primary/trunk/motorway alone (or move it to some other tag,
and get rid of highway=trunk and highway=motorway).

As for the freeway/expressway notion, note that this is regional
langauge and we don't walk that way in Boston (we're too busy running
red lights and using our horns!!).  But seriously, I don't know those
distinctions and people don't really use those words.

I guess you are suggesting to add highway=expressway to have expressway
mean "sort of motorway but not quite" and change trunk to be "very
important".  I am afraid that with so much established tagging the only
reasonable approach to orthogonalization is to adopt two new tags for
the things in question and deprecate the old way, allowing for a long
and messy transition.