[Talk-us] Update on potential highway classification reform

[Martijn van Exel]

Thanks Brian and New England mappers for all the thinking that went into 
this. At first I have to admit I felt a bit exasperated when I saw this 
discussion come up yet again, as it has at least annually since I moved 
to the U.S. in 2011 :).  But you have really gone the extra mile and did 
the work getting people on board, and even creating a working map for 
people to look at. Kudos!

I also have to admit that I have not been able to completely keep up 
with all the discussions in the different places (but good that you link 
to where they happen on the wiki page). So I may have missed something, 
but I am missing one element in the plan and discussion here. What do 
you expect to happen next? Do you plan to have a wiki vote like people 
do on tagging? When is the discussion "concluded"? And after that, what 
do you want to happen with the existing classifications? Will you be 
proposing some sort of organized editing to update important roads 
throughout the country?

Another thing that I am missing is attention to the lower road classes. 
I have an accepted lightning talk at State of the Map this summer that 
is entitled "Bye Bye Unclassified"[0]. From that title, you should be 
able to discern what that will be about :) I am on the fence about 
including lower road classes in this discussion, because the topic is 
already so broad and controversial. On the other hand, now that we have 
everyone's eyes and ears on this topic, it seems like a missed 
opportunity to not also give some thought to those lower road classes. 
Right now, there is just a short paragraph about "Secondary and lower". 
I have some specific ideas about simplifying that aspect of road 
classification, and I can extend that section, if you want.

Again, thanks for the work on this and looking forward to continuing the 
discussion.

Martijn

[0] 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2021/registration_lightning_talks

On 5/17/2021 3:54 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'd like to provide the community an update on the work that's been 
> happening to improve the current state of US highway classifications.  
> Following the recent talk-us threads, there were extensive debates in 
> Slack, especially in the #local-us-northeast channel, about how to 
> better apply the highway classification values with international 
> norms, especially the trunk classification, which seems to be the most 
> challenging.
>
> There was a strong consensus initially amongst New England mappers 
> that the highway classifications should be used in a way that's 
> consistent with the connectivity importance of various roads.  There 
> was also a general agreement that documenting state-specific highway 
> classification criteria was important for preventing edit wars as well 
> as documenting edge or unusual cases and the rationale behind them.
>
> The outcome of those discussions was the following wiki page[1], which 
> offers general guidelines that can be applied in state-specific ways 
> to come up with criteria that mappers can follow.  As part of these 
> discussions, local mappers have been drafting state-specific pages 
> that would implement these general guidelines.  State-specific 
> criteria have been drafted so far for: MA, MS, NH, RI, VT, TX, and WA.
>
> In order to demonstrate what the new classification would look like on 
> the map, the New England mappers have put together a temporary live 
> demo[2] which shows what this new arrangement would look like at the 
> motorway and trunk level.  This demo is set up to show the proposed 
> "new" highway classification alignment in *four* New England states 
> only: VT, NH, MA, and RI.  The rest of the country is shown with no 
> change to highway classification.  In addition, this demo map is 
> rigged to show motorway/trunk at their normal zoom levels, but 
> suppress highway=secondary until zoomed in close, in order to 
> specifically examine the motorway/trunk network in better detail.
>
> Links:
>
> [1] 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Highway_classification 
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Highway_classification>
> [2] http://74.97.52.189:6789/openstreetmap-carto/#7/43.250/-70.756 
> <http://74.97.52.189:6789/openstreetmap-carto/#7/43.250/-70.756>
>
> I offer this update as an invitation to further collaboration on how 
> we might better map highway classifications in the US.
>
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