[Talk-us] USFS Roads - name and ref

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:46 PM Bob Gambrel <rjgambrel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul Johnson says
>
> Ultimately consider adding a route relation with network=US:NSFR:Forest
> Name:FH/FR as well so we can finally kill off route tagging on things that
> are not routes.
>
>
> I am not doing any mapping for forest roads, but the above caught my eye.
> I am doing a lot of bike path/trail mapping as well as mapping cycle
> routes. I understand the idea of adding a route relation. What confuses me
> a little above is:
>
>  so we can finally kill off route tagging on things that
> are not routes.
>
> I think you might be saying that there are ways that seem to have a route
> name in the name field and they shouldn't. Instead they should have the way
> be part of a relation that has the name of the route.
>

Route name and route ref.  Pennsylvania and Oregon (at a minimum) have
state highways and state routes, that are not always (particularly on older
roads) the same.  Oregon, for example, has a lot of state highways, *all of
which are numbered*, that have no state route, and most of the 20 or so
oldest routes now traverse multiple different highways, with only routes
created after about 2000 having the same highway and route number
consistently and no plans to retcon.  Right now, practice is to ignore the
ref (even if no route traverses it) that the state actually uses for the
way, and instead ref=* gets tagged with the route that traverses over it
(or leave it off if there is no route).  This isn't orthogonal, *at all*,
with how anything else is tagged.  The ref=* on the way in this case, is
not an attribute that belongs to the way.  It belongs to the route.  I get
*why* it's that way, but the introduction of relations as a basic primitive
10 years ago obsoleted this practice.  We should be moving forward towards
all routes being tagged in a route relation so we can phase out route
attributes on ways, freeing those up for *the way's attributes.*

Please be patient if I am using some wrong terms above. Still learning
> the OSM lingo. I am really just trying to understand the last part of what
> you said. (Especially if you think it might apply to cycle routes too)
>

No problem.  The takeaway is, yes, go ahead and use the existing ref=*
practice on the way, but please also create the route relation if it
doesn't exist yet.
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