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

Fri Sep 17 18:05:48 UTC 2021

Hi, what a wonderful discussion about a topic I love to read, think and talk about. I will need to take some time with a large beverage to read through the entire thread. One thing I picked up on is a lot of mentions of unclassified and residential and how to disambiguate between them.

I pitched the idea of getting rid of unclassified altogether in a lightning talk at SOTM and started a proposal wiki page which a few of you contributed to: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/highway%3Dstreet 

There's some discussion on the Talk tab of that page as well.

I would really enjoy hearing your thoughts on this. My main objective with this has been to simplify the 'bottom end' of the highway hierarchy by removing a distinction that is, to my mind, not significant enough to warrant separate unclassified and residential road classes.

Thanks, happy mapping,
--
  Martijn van Exel
  m at rtijn.org

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021, at 13:21, Jmapb wrote:
> Highway=unclassified is one of the several annoying OSM tags that does not mean what the words mean. It doesn't mean that the classification is nebulous, or that a decision is pending. It's for roads that connect locations but are a tier on the road network below tertiary. And yes, the unfortunate name "unclassified," I'm told, is derived from standard highway nomenclature in the UK and so made it's way into OSM. 
> 
> Likewise highway=residential is also one of the annoying OSM tags that isn't to be tagged or interpreted in a literal fashion. It's used for local public roads that don't serve the purpose of linking locations. It doesn't matter whether these roads are alongside dwellings, factories, offices, shops, or wilderness.
> 
> These are the tagging standards I've come to believe in. Carto and other renderers may choose to draw unclassified and residential in the same width and color, and routers may choose not to favor one over the other, but these choices don't change the definitions. 
> 
> I can't say exactly whose word I took on these definitions, or when or where -- probably some combination of the wiki, the mailing list, conversations, changeset comments, and other channels -- but I've been under the naive impression that this was a settled question. It seems it's not! If the nature of the low end of the highway classification hierarchy is indeed up for debate, I'd say the NY proposal's recommendations for anything below tertiary might be better replaced with a simple text that recommends following standard tagging practices and local conventions.
> 
> Jason
> 
> On 9/11/2021 8:11 PM, Eric Patrick wrote:
>> Isn't UNCLASSIFIED something the Europeans or maybe just the British use for their designations? Does it have a higher or lower priority than RESIDENTIAL roads? I did some testing in Oklahoma and found that TERTIARY and RESIDENTIAL both equal the same. Routing doesn't prefer one over the other. As Brian had pointed out here, OSM-carto doesn't make that distinction either.
>> 
>> On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 7:18 PM Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks Jason, Kevin, and the NY mapping community for all the hard work that's going into this!
>>> 
>>> Regarding: 
>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> We had fairly extensive, and quite inconclusive discussions about whether unclassified and residential are peers, or whether unclassified is "above" residential in the hierarchy.  Certainly from a render perspective, openstreetmap-carto and OpenMapTiles (the two I happen to be familiar with) do not make any distinction between the two, rendering both of them equally.  I've heard it noted that some routers do give unclassified less of a router penalty than residential but more than tertiary.
>>> 
>>> In RI, I've been using unclassified for minor roads that don't qualify for residential, service, or track, or tertiary.  For example, a minor road to a dead-end industrial area.  The folks up in Vermont have been using it as an intermediate level between residential and tertiary.  I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer to this question, but it didn't seem like from our discussions that it's something we have a consensus or settled answer on.
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