[OSM-talk] [tagging] updated RFC: Highway administrative and physical descriptions

[Lester Caine]

Alex Mauer wrote:
> Lester Caine wrote:
>>> Hmm, that's not what I was going for.  I was going for the 
>>> "administrative designation" of the road (that is, M, A, B [I gather] in 
>>> the UK, I-, US, [state abbrev] in the US) .  In the US this is closely 
>>> tied to who maintains it.  In Europe it seems to be much more closely 
>>> tied to its physical characteristics, and varies wildly from country to 
>>> country.
>> The basic problem is the lack of any clarity between countries on road 
>> definitions. The 'designation' of a road adds little to knowledge of its 
>> structure in the UK some main A roads have single lane passing places and 10 
>> MPH speed limits while others are much higher quality than most motorways. 
>> Just keep the road designation as it reference number and then worry about 
>> such things as 3 4 or 5 lanes each way without reference to 'different types 
>> of motorway'.
> 
> But is there any easy/consistent way to determine whether a road is a
> "national route", "regional route", "county route" or something similar
> to that, in the UK?
> 
> based upon
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_road_numbering_scheme it
> seems to me that A roads correspond with a national route, and B with a
> regional route.

Motorways are also national routes, but both motorways and A roads may only 
cover a few miles while adjacent B roads can cover many counties and be used 
as national routes simply because there is no other road going in the right 
direction. The 'history' from that page explains well why a distinction 
between national, regional and county routes simple does not map to motorway, 
A, B ( and unclassified ). While government may like reclassifying roads to 
move responsibility for who maintains them, simply renumbering a major 
regional link as a B road does not change its impotence. So bottom line - no 
there is not a consistent way to map M, A and B to "national route", "regional 
route", "county route" The M32 is a county route into Bristol, the B4058 is an 
alternative regional route that connects with towns and villages north of the 
M4, which the M32 does not allow access to, but the M32 is simply a short 
bypass not a national or regional route. Currently sat nav systems simply 
ignore any distinction anyway so we currently have a major problem with large 
vehicles using roads because that is the given route, but it is totally 
unsuitable. The road classifications simply add to this confusion, hence the 
need to identify roads ( in the UK ) against their ACTUAL physical state 
rather than grouping things by an inappropriate global tagging.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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