[Talk-us] USFS Roads - name and ref

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 4:15 PM Bob Gambrel <rjgambrel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul's in depth answer of my question was very helpful. Luckily I am not
> concentrating on road/highway routes. I like the concept of:
>
> 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.*
>
> That intuitively makes sense. It seems to me that most routes these days
> are really a collection of ways (collected by the route relation).
>

This was *literally* a reason relations became a thing in API 0.5.  Though
the design problem being solved was mostly "The UK has Sustrans and MOT
routes and existing ref=* can't deal with both", not that "EU routes also
cross through the UK" and "the US has three national networks, at least 70
state networks, over 200 indian networks, and nearly 4000 county networks
for highways, not counting the potential for nearly the same number of the
same for cyclists".  Not a problem yet but wouldn't surprise me, especially
now that a lot of places are moving bicycle infrastructure from "nice to
have if we have money left over" to "no hurry, 20 years ago is fine" thanks
to COVID19, that we might need to make route=bicycle relations have the
same network=* tags as route=road, down the line.


> I explained this to some city planners, newer to OSM than I was, with
> three examples (an Interstate that actually includes a Ferry, clearly not
> part of a single paved way, a bus route traversing many different streets,
> and the MRT (Miss. River Trail) which consists of streets, highways, bike
> paths, ...)
>

There's an Interstate that traverses a ferry??  I knew of two drawbridges
and six traffic signals but a ferry's a new one on me.  But yeah, routes
are frequently highway=* agnostic within the limits of the type of vehicle
that the route is intended for, for the most part (granted, Historic Route
66 has at least one staircase in it now).
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