[Talk-us] US Trunk road tagging

[Evin Fairchild]

On Wed, May 5, 2021, 9:44 AM Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>
wrote:

> NHS is itself a functional road classification scheme, just not one that
> maps cleanly to other classification schemes, because it's very
> explicitly about funding. The law literally says which streets are part
> of the system.
>
> Tagging the entire NHS, sans Interstates, as highway=trunk would result
> in basically every signposted local truck route becoming a trunk road.
> (As in MUTCD R14-1, not M4-4.) It wouldn't technically add much
> information to the map, because NE2 already went around tagging NHS=* on
> the whole system as it was back then.
>
> It would be more reasonable to tag the Other Principal Arterials class
> as highway=trunk, but NHS is not the only scheme that includes an Other
> Principal Arterials class. That terminology comes from the FHWA's
> Highway Functional Classification system. It's unlikely that Congress
> and FHWA agree on every individual principal arterial classification, so
> there could still be persistent disagreements about highway=trunk.
>

I am not suggesting to tag *every* route that is on the NHS as trunk.

To be clear, my proposal is to tag only NHS routes that are on state and US
routes. Also, I don't think we should include intermodal connectors either.
That will hopefully cut down on the number of NHS routes in urban areas.

Lately there's been a lot of discussion about an Americentric renderer
> on OSMUS Slack. [1] It's an idea OSMUS has been kicking around forever,
> but the enthusiasm around highway classification and shields may help
> make it a reality.
>
> It would be feasible for an Americentric renderer to apply an orthogonal
> rendering style to expressway=yes, but I'm sober about the ability of
> such a renderer to resolve highway=trunk disputes on its own. After all,
> osm.org's openstreetmap-carto style is still the front door for mappers
> everywhere. Maybe better editor support could help tip the scales, but
> expressway=yes may be a hard sell to globally relevant editors and data
> consumers, being so peculiar to the U.S.
>
> [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Map_style



That's interesting; it would certainly nice to have a US-centric renderer
if only to show route shields, but it would definitely be great to have it
render the expressway=yes tag. There would probably be less need to have
trunk be representing expressway.
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