[Talk-us] Highway ref on way or relation?

[Eric H. Christensen]

Looking at some data this morning and realized that some roads in Maryland had ref tag on the way and a duplicate ref tag on their relation.  Thinking this might be a way to fix another problem I'm seeing in some renderers for displaying refs, I removed the ref tags off of a small section of MD-2 in Calvert County to test.  It appears that the rendering engine for OSM.org is not looking at ref tags in the relations at all and only what is set on the way.  Is this expected behavior?  The wiki seems to suggest[0] that multiple refs should be maintained using relations.  What am I missing here?

--Eric

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ref#Notes