[OSM-talk] Advanced highway tagging

[Andrew MacKinnon]

On Nov 21, 2007 9:13 AM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 20, 2007 11:24 PM, Andrew MacKinnon <andrewpmk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Do you have any examples of other maps where road drawing is not based
> > > solely on objective features? I'd be interested to see how they work.
> > > Or are you breaking new (cartographical) ground with trying to combine
> > > autocartography with subjectivity? I can imagine specific cartography
> > > (a map of a limited set of roads, drawn individually by someone)
> > > incorporating specific subjective features, but I'd be interested in
> > > altases or similar doing so).
> >
> > All commercial online maps decide which roads are major and which are
> > minor on a subjective basis.
>
> Do you have any *specific* examples? For example where two motorways
> in Google Maps are rendered in different colours?
>

Motorways are pretty much always rendered consistently, the exception
being motorways (or roads built to a standard approaching motorways)
which are designated as something lower, like an A road. I was
thinking more along the lines of more minor roads, such as urban
four-lane and two-lane arterials and collector roads. Google Maps (and
similar services) decides which to call "major" based on what seems to
be somewhat arbitrary criteria, in order to make the map easier to
read - e.g. some major two-lane roads are coloured yellow by Google
Maps, while others (which in some cases are of similar importance) are
coloured white. For example, in Kingston, Canada, Google Maps colours
King Street yellow, but Union Street, a road with similar traffic
levels, is coloured white - arbitrarily.