[Talk-us] [Talk-us-newyork] Highway classification guidelines for New York State

[Kevin Kenny]

Hi, Jason!  Thanks for the detailed review! It's obvious you put a lot of
time and thinking into this message.  Welcome to the little conspiracy
that's attempting to rationalize the tagging of the US highway network!

On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 6:43 PM Jmapb <jmapb at gmx.com> wrote:

> Hybrid upstate NY and NYC mapper here.  Glad to hear this project is
> still churning along. It's much changed since the last time I read it.
>

I don't claim to be a NYC mapper. I was born in Queens, but haven't lived
there for nearly fifty years, and have very seldom had business there since
my mother passed away a decade ago. I'm still somewhat familiar with the
street network down that way, though. I know there's an active Downstate
mapping community with which I'm not regularly in touch.


>
> These comments refer to the 16:36, 7 September 2021‎ version (still
> current at the moment) of the proposal
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:_New_York/Highway_Classification
>
>
> I feel the proposal page could use more introductory material before
> jumping into the weeds. It would be helpful to have a "Background"
> section that describes the current state of NY highway classification
> and why it's in want of overhaul, and a "Goals" section that describes
> the desired features of an improved classification system, according to
> the best understood consensus. I'd also like to see what previously-used
> tagging standards the new proposal deprecates.
>

I should have been more explicit that this proposal is intended to dovetail
with
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Highway_classification
which attempts to set out more detailed, unified project goals. THe first
sentence of the page references it, but it should be made more obvious that
it's required background material.

Previously-used tagging standards?  In the US?  Aside from 'whatever it was
the TIGER dragged in', what standards did we actually have?


> Now, into the weeds..!
>
>  > 1. highway=motorway
>
>   - Anomaly #2, "single-carriageway roads that are arterial class 1",
> lists several examples but does not make any explicit tagging
> recommendations. Are these to be tagged highway=motorway or not?
>

There may be some judgment and discussion involved here.  My inclination is
that if the section in question is short and free of at-grade
intersections, as when the road crosses a bridge, goes through a tunnel, or
encounters a toll plaza or Customs post, it continues to be a motorway.

The other case is typified by NY 17 between Deposit and Hancock, where
there's simply an unbuilt section of motorway, and the road becomes a
surface street for several miles. That's clearly a trunk road and not a
motorway. Likewise, the part of Taconic Parkway that has frequent grade
crossings is not a motorway, even if it's built to simulate a high-speed
road.


>   - Anomaly #4, "short sections of motorway that connect to trunks at
> either end", seems to suggest that small islands of motorway surrounded
> by trunk are correct mapping practice, for FCCs in the A10 to A18 range.
> Some previous mapping standards have forbidden such islands, so best to
> make this explicit.
>

Arterial class in NY actually does a lot to split the two cases.  The idea
is that an urban arterial with a few elevated crossings in a row doesn't
suddenly become a motorway, but up at the north end, Taconic Parkway has a
few disconnected sections where all the crossings are elevated and it
definitely feels motorway-ish.

NY 13 north of Ithaca is pretty much the borderline between the two. It
could be argued either way - and I've seen it argued both ways.  The
proposal is, 'when in doubt, pass the buck to the DOT' so that we don't
have edit wars over the edge cases.


>   - Re the "ball of yarn" motorway renderings, I personally don't hate
> them much. If a city is thick with motorways, that's what I expect to
> see. But if a tag to filter out certain local highway=motorway ways at
> low zoom is needed, suburban=yes seems like a poor choice for it, based
> on the examples given. There's an opaque claim that "the analysis" (the
> summary table below says "consider adding suburban=yes if ACC=2", is
> that "the analysis"?) has determined which motorways should be tagged as
> suburban, but the Major Deegan and BQE, for example, are in dense urban
> areas. (And Flatbush Avenue Extension is not a motorway at all.)
>

I'd have to check on Flatbush Avenue Extension - the table was largely
produced by a script, as you probably guessed.  It could be a link road
mistagged as a motorway - there are a couple of those - or it could be the
Marine Parkway Bridge.  (There are a couple of other data entry errors I've
found in the NY data set; really, all 'authoritative' data need to be taken
with a grain of salt.)




>   - Relatedly, the sample renderings linked for "Map of all motorways in
> New York State" and "Map of most significant (ACC=1) motorways in New
> York State" both link to the same image file, NY-motorways-all.png
>

Oops. Copy-n-paste error.  Fixed.

 > 2. highway=trunk
>
>   - "The status of a road being a trunk has nothing to do with its
> physical characteristics and everything to do with its importance to the
> road network", great to have this clearly stated; I'd suggest also
> mentioning stop and speed controls just to be extra explicit, since
> these might not be understood to be physical characteristics of the
> roads themselves.
>

Will do.


>   - Regarding the trunk roads linking up with other highway=trunks at
> state line crossings: is this a project goal? Just with highway=trunk,
> or with all classifications? What about the Canadian border?
>

It's more an implicit goal.  If the idea is that trunk roads link centers
of population (NY's operational definition: 600 largest cities in North
America), then to have a trunk road terminate other than in or near one of
these population centers (or, in some corner cases, at "land's end" or at a
facility such as a ferry terminal) would be peculiar. (For that reason, for
instance, NY 32 and NY 85 south and west of Albany are not trunks, and
neither is NY 23 west of Catskill. They're multi-lane divided, fairly
high-speed roads, with most grade crossings eliminated, but they don't go
anywhere; they disappear into the primary road network. (Depending on just
what an expressway is, they might be expressways.)


>   - Regarding trunks in NYC, this merits some separate discussion and
> maybe a distinct ruleset (either for NYC in particular or for dense city
> centers in general.) Personally, I dislike the promotion of individual
> city blocks to trunk (south of the Lincoln Tunnel for instance) and I
> believe that trunk is more suitable than motorway for bridges like the
> Brooklyn and Manhattan that terminate on the surface-level urban grid.
> In the other direction, there are candidates for promotion to trunk,
> such as the Mosholu Parkway and the Bronx and Pelham Parkway.
>

Definitely, NYC needs more discussion.  Here, I was trying to compare with
UK tagging practice - which is the origin of the `highway=*`
classification, and held up as an example that other nations should try to
emulate.  Central London is relatively free of trunk, and even primary
roads; they tend to terminate at ring roads and not enter the city center
as trunks/primaries, so perhaps the dearth of trunks in the Five Boroughs
and Long Island makes sense.


>   - Re "There are only a handful of anomalies ... these should be easy
> to patch", I'd again like to see some clarification on goals. (Based on
> the examples, it appears that the idea is to avoid sub-trunk islands
> with trunk on either end. The "Classification for highway=highway based
> on NYS DOT codes" table under Summary references the necessity to
> "connect the network.")
>

Once again, this comes down to the idea that trunks link population
centers.  Terminating a trunk in some relatively small town only to pick it
up again on the other side doesn't make sense, but there are a few
anomalous cases where that's what happens.  Terminating a trunk on the
outskirts of a medium-sized city does occasionally make sense when the
purpose of that trunk is to link that city to the larger network.


>  > 3. highway=primary
>
>   - Re "the network appears to be free from routing islands or
> unexplained spurs", are there situations where a highway=primary spur is
> acceptable?
>

Sure - anywhere it reaches 'land's end' or terminates in or near a town
that it serves.  Previous attempts at classification have generated a lot
of strange fragments in cases, for instance, where a rural highway broadens
to four lanes or divides when it approaches a freeway interchange; it
doesn't make sense to have `highway=primary` proceeding a mile or two into
farmland just because of that if the rest of the road is `secondary` or
less.


>   - The state map at this point is crowded enough that it's hard to
> discern where to quibble on classifications. (The easy approach, of
> course, is simply not to quibble and take things as DOT serves them up.)
>

I'll say that I, at least, have no immediate plans to have a
reclassification campaign for `primary` and below.  From here on, the
classification guidelines get much rougher.


>   - The NYC map does indeed have a deficit of primary roads within the
> boros. A few of the more prominent primaries (by current tagging) that
> are missing are: Richmond Ave and Hyland Blvd in Staten Island; 4th Ave,
> Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, Eastern Parkway, Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn;
> Grand and Flushing Avenues connecting Brooklyn and Queens; Astoria and
> Woodhaven Boulevards in Queens; Grand Concourse in the Bronx; and many
> north/south avenues in Manhattan. My take here is that highway=primary
> does not map well to Arterial Code 3 within NYC -- and I suspect the
> same issue will arise in other large cities.
>

The proper class for urban arterials has been debated a long time, and as
far as I can tell, there's not much consensus among Downstate mappers.  I'd
surely include the urban portions of NY 24, 25, 25A, 27 as well as
everything you mentioned (except that I'm far from convinced that most of
the Manhattan avenues would qualify.  DOT's intention seems to be to give
routing preference to a couple of the avenues on the extreme East and West
Sides and to Broadway.


>   - Re the "Primary highways in New York State" map, it appears to show
> many more trunk roads (in red) than the "Map of trunk roads in New York
> State" above. Are some of these red roads primary? Maybe they're the
> proposed expressway=yes primaries?
>

Good point. I need to work on the legend and probably redraw that map.
They're not proposed as trunk roads unless they appear on the map of trunk
roads. (Yes, the Adirondacks are trunk-less.)

  > 4. highway=secondary

>
>   - The proposal is to tag any numbered state highway that hasn't been
> handled by the above cases with highway=secondary, which doesn't sound
> like a bad idea... but again, there's no easy way to compare the
> proposed secondaries to the current map.
>

Yeah, at that point the network gets awfully dense and I'd need to stand up
a tile server to produce a scrollable, zoomable map.  That's be a pain in
the posterior; given that there are no immediate plans for a statewide
reclassification campaign at secondary and below, how much of a point is
there to it?


>   - The summary table also adds "the four signed New York State
> Reference Routes" as proposed secondaries. Which routes are these?
>

961F between Arkport and Burns
962J joining NYY 434 to NY 17C in Owego
990L (Main Street in Norwich)
990V between Gilboa and Conesville.

All are signed with the conventional shield for a NY touring route.


>   - No other possible criteria for highway=secondary are mentioned. Are
> there any remaining sections of US highways that might qualify? And as
> with the primaries, there should at least be some allowance for tagging
> highway=secondary for prominent urban roads between neighborhoods.
>

Good point, will change to 'US or state highway' (Missing bits of US
highways was an oversight).  Can you tell that I'm trying hard not to get
sucked into the discussion of urban arterials by confining my focus to no
city bigger than Buffalo?


> - For highway=secondary and below, there's no more discussion about
> avoiding spurs and islands. Should spurs and islands be allowed from
> secondary down?
>

I would assume that the secondary network should at least be routable onto
the primary network. Barring that, there's no specific guidance, since
there's no specification of what places the secondary network serves, other
than "every town and village".


>  > 5. highway=tertiary
>
>   - "any numbered county route not covered by any of the above rules -
> including unpaved and seasonal routes. These routes can be of
> considerable local importance despite the inconveniences attendant upon
> their poor quality" sounds a little hand-wavy to me... yes they *can* be
> of local importance, but does that translate to automatic tertiary
> status for the entirety of every county road? I know a few in the
> Catskills that simply dead-end into wilderness. Perhaps, as with some of
> the higher classifications, the proposal should allow for discretion in
> places where the objectively derived classifications don't make sense.
>

Yeah, I know the ones you're talking about.  Greene County Route 6 is most
likely tertiary into the village of Spruceton. If the county wants to call
it tertiary and post shields all the way up to the DEC gate, I'm not going
to argue.  Greene County Route 3 is weird because the section through the
pass between Bearpen and Vly Mountains is abandoned. (It's still a legal
right-of-way - you can drive on it without getting a ticket, but your
insurance would likely take a dim view of it were you to have an
accident!)  Greene County Route 56 serves Maplecrest village for a few
blocks and then goes through the farms of Big Hollow, ending again at the
DEC gate. Ulster County Route 49 serves the hamlet of Seager but then
dead-ends in wilderness beyond, and so on.

Since there's no guidance about what a tertiary road must serve, I don't
have anything really objective to offer. The distinction among tertiary,
unclassified, residential, and the higher grades of track is far from
clear, and I'd rather leave that for a different day and a different
project!

  - The proposal also suggests highway=tertiary for any New York State
> Reference Route that hasn't merited a higher classification. But that's
> it. I don't like the implied suggestion of automatic demotion for any
> tertiaries that haven't met these criteria. IMO local mappers need to
> have a freer hand in assigning tertiary -- in urban situations,
> certainly, but also for small village main streets and such, county
> number or no.
>

Intention wasn't to demote actual tertiary roads, but to offer the idea
that signage as a county highway or designation as a reference route is a
strong indication that a road is at least tertiary. (It may be higher;
Ulster County Route 47 probably ought to be considered a secondary road
because there's no other route to Claryville, Frost Valley, Oliverea and
Big Indian.)


>  > 6. highway=unclassified
>  > 7. highway=residential
>
> I feel the proposal gets into some murky territory by basing
> highway=unclassified on commercial traffic. There has always been a
> highway hierarchy with unclassified at the bottom rank, and then
> residential below that, ie, not ranked at all. Unclassified is for the
> most minor roads that link locations, residential is for public roads
> that don't. How these classifications are mapped to reality varies
> wildly over the globe (the names themselves are nearly meaningless) but
> the suggestion that we should choose between these two classifications
> by the *type* of traffic carried -- not by the role in linking
> locations, the amount of traffic, the distance covered, or the road's
> routing prominence -- seems like a sharp departure from tagging norms.
>

The continuum of tertiary - unclassified - residential - track is indeed
murky.  The vague idea in routing was indeed that an unclassified road
links locations - and most commercial and industrial facilities are
locations to be linked, while isolated dwellings and small farms likely are
'residential'. I think we're in violent agreement here.


>  > Expressways
>
> Re "Grade-separated interchanges (access_control=full,
> access_control=partial)", these are undocumented tags. What do they
> mean? Are they part of this proposal?
>

No, they're in wide use, albeit not Wikified, as Minh mentioned.

I will confess to confusion here.  Nobody seems to know what an expressway
is, or rather, I get many conflicting explanations. But people keep telling
me that the `expressway=yes` tag is important for high-speed roads that
nonetheless have 'primary' or lower classification.


>  > Road Access
>
>   - "privately owned and maintained residential roads and service ways
> should be restricted to at most access=destination if they are open to
> deliveries, or else the network will present problems for routing
> delivery trucks", very happy to see this discussed. There are many
> subtle distinctions that inform good access tagging, but in general
> access=private is greatly overused.
>   - "Appropriate conditional access tags should be added to ways that
> are only seasonally maintained", some examples here would help
> standardize seasonal tagging across the state.
>

Every time I tag one of these, I have to look it up. I think I tagged the
section of Platte Clove Road https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/20093261
from West Saugerties to the Platte Clove Bruderhof correctly, even though
the dates on the sign are often a trifle optimistic. (I've seen it open
early if by some miracle there wasn't an avalanche in the winter; I've seen
it still closed well into June if the avalanches were bad ones. I've seen
it close before Hallowe'en if the snow comes early. But I'll go with what's
on the sign.)



>
>
>  > Memorial and symbolic highway names
>
> Both honorary_name and memorial_name are in use and seem more correct
> for this purpose, so why is official_name preferable? Personally I like
> honorary_name because it would cover non-memorial situations, eg, where
> a living person's name is used. (Currently memorial_name has more uses,
> but they're all the same road, "USS Indianapolis Memorial Highway".)
>

I'll let you and Minh fight this one out. :)  I'm just trying to avoid
'Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway' become the main name of the NY Thruway when
nobody calls it that (and few signs mention it now that the toll gantries
are down).

>
>
>  > Routes with only a route number
>
> This topic is a tricky one, and again, would benefit from a statement of
> goals.
>
> My own goal in this area has been to provide name tagging that will
> allow Nominatim (and presumably other geocoders) to find mapped
> addresses in all common forms. To this end, I'm in favor of populating
> name, ref, and sometimes alt_name and short_name, on the highway ways
> that comprise numbered routes. On NY 28 for example: name=State Route
> 28, ref=NY 28, alt_name=State Highway 28, short_name=Route 28.
>
> The proposal suggests that the street names found on the imported
> address points be used to guide the choice of name tags for the ways.
> But the names found in the addr:street tags vary considerably in form --
> all of the street names above are in use along NY 28 in Ulster County,
> for example. (I haven't seen just the ref, eg addr:street=NY 28, on any
> of dead10ck's imports, but this form does exist in hand-mapped data.)
>
> I suggest that this proposal is a good opportunity to standardize on
> accurate and useful name tags for unnamed highway members of numbered
> routes. The above example might be a good template for state routes;
> variations could be concocted for numbered US and county roads.
>
> The proposal mentions that "In this situation, some mappers prefer to
> enter noname=yes." This is undoubtedly true, and has some decent logic
> behind it. Adding numbered name tags to the member ways is
> controversial. Some influential people really hate the practice. But
> this is a proposal, not a tag documentation page, so we should describe
> what we want to see happen. If we want to use noname=yes, that's what
> should be proposed. If we want to use name tags, that's what should be
> proposed. And if we're not up for implementing unified statewide
> standards for numbered route way naming, then IMO there's no use
> including this section in a statewide proposal -- and we can let the
> current TIGER names continue to fester.
>

Point taken. I'm willing to agree that editing names of unnamed numbered
highways is Out Of Scope for this proposal.

>
>
> In closing, I'm very excited for this proposal and sincere thanks to
> everyone who's been working on it. Happy to help in whatever way I can.
>

Thanks!  There's going to be a lot of work ahead of us.  It's good to hear
that even if we're not on the same page everywhere, we're at least singing
from the same hymnal.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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