[Talk-us] Update on potential highway classification reform

[Jmapb]

On 5/23/2021 12:29 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
> With regard to Ithaca, I had this paper map from 2011 lying around,
> here's a clip from it:
> https://imgur.com/gallery/k7SCY53 <https://imgur.com/gallery/k7SCY53>
>
> It seems they thought that NY-13 was the most important road through
> Ithaca.  I'm not advocating copying from another map of course, but it's
> interesting to see the choices that other cartographers made when faced
> with the same issue.

NY-13 is definitely the most important road through Ithaca. (The USGS
National Map [0] agrees.)

And we can achieve a similar rendering on OSM, correctly indicating the
importance of NY-13, by using highway=trunk for all of the segments
between Horseheads and Cortland.

It's a hard sell to many OSM mappers (possibly some data consumers as
well) that the motorway-like portion of NY-13 in the Ithaca sprawl [1]
should get the same highway level tag as the village Main Street in
Dryden [2] but I think that's illustrative of a key aspect of this
proposal -- that the highway=* tag shouldn't reflect just the properties
of the individual segment, but the importance of the larger stretch of
road that it's part of. (But not necessarily of the entire route
relation, eg NY-13 north of Cortland.)

I feel this is a departure from the tagging standards I've become
accustomed to, and it whiffs a little of tagging-for-the-renderer. But
not in a dire way, at least not in this case. And the fact that it
reflects the UK classification system that originated the highway tag
values gives it some legitimacy.

If you believe that sending a single trunk (NY-13) through Ithaca is
sufficient, let's find a better wording for "the collection of all
highway=motorway + highway=trunk should comprise of the network of roads
on which a motorist would travel when transiting between any pair of
important population centers" that lets us off the hook for a direct
trunk route from Ithaca to Rochester. Maybe something like "the
collection of all highway=motorway + highway=trunk should comprise a
network of roads connecting all important population centers."

Jason

[0] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbPVHEeofhJna2b5GAaReEM5E59DbLi3oBzetEG9tpWe3
[1] https://tinyurl.com/r89uebyd
[2] https://tinyurl.com/3bxkpw5t