[OSM-talk] definition of the main highway-tag

[Elena of Valhalla]

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Christiaan
Welvaart<cjw at daneel.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Why would who maintains a road directly determine its administrative
> classification?  If a municipality decides that some road is a motorway, we
> better tag it as such. In The Netherlands some provinces maintain short
> stretches of motorway, for example, while most motorways are maintained by
> the national government. The maintainer of a road can be tagged
> independently. So is it really a big change for Germany and Italy to define
> the highway tag as the administrative classification of the road?

As Martin already said, yes, it would be a big change, and it would
become quite meaningless (I speak about Italy, don't know about
Germany)

At least in Italy, the law states that the importance of a road
defines its administrative status, and this in turn decided who is
going to maintain it: if it was like this it would be great for OSM.

The problem is that a few years ago the central government road agency
started to try and get rid of some expenses, and lots of "statali"
(nationwide importance) got demoted to "regionali" and "provinciali"
(lower and more local importance) so that somebody else had to pay for
them, even when they still were the only road connecting two cities.
Conversely, since the national agency is quite slow and lots of old
"statali" pass through densely built areas, some local government
decided to build better variants; they have grown to be more important
than the old "statali", but they're still categorized as "provinciali"
because of who has build them.

Motorways and half-motorways ("extraurbane principali" according to
the italian law, "superstrade" for anyone else) are categorized by the
italian law
according to physical features instead, regardless of importance and
maintainer, so the above does not apply.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''

homepage: http://www.trueelena.org
email: elena.valhalla at gmail.com