[Talk-us] Update on potential highway classification reform

[Zeke Farwell]

On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 1:36 PM Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> wrote:

> 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 :).
>
Completely understandable, Martijn!  The discussions on highway
classification have been long, recurring, and quite exasperating.  I've
mostly stayed out of it until recently because it just seemed too
contentious and I didn't have the energy.  I'm not sure why I decided to
get involved this time, but it's probably because there seems to be a group
of fairly level headed people willing to think things through carefully
while keeping an open mind.

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?
>
I'm not entirely sure what should happen next, but I think a formal
proposal and a vote would be sensible.  It would force us to  tighten up
the language, deal with edge cases, etc.  Usually proposals are for new
tagging schemes, but this one here wasn't:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Highway_key_voting_importance

It is also quite relevant to this discussion.


On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 6:32 PM Jmapb <jmapb at gmx.com> wrote:

> It could well be that NY State deserves one page of classification rules,
> and NYC another. But if we end up with a list of 50 different state
> rulesets, all with city-specific addenda, I feel for the sanity of the
> mappers (not to mention the wiki maintainers.)


That certainly does sound a bit overwhelming, but I feel like it is
representative of this country.  Though there are similarities, each state
transportation department manages their road network differently so state
specific guidance feels appropriate.  Ideally I'd like to see high level
national guidelines that are clear enough for some consistency across state
lines, but flexible enough to allow for state specific variation where it
makes sense.  The mantra of OSM is "it's up to local mappers to decide..."
after all, and our states are comparable in size to many countries around
the world.
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