[OSM-talk] When is a road a secondary road and when is it not?

[Richard Mann]

 I'd stick to the ABC classifications, except where a road is clearly
over-classified (ie it's been bypassed, or blocked to through traffic). This
can happen because of reluctance to declassify a road (which means less
money to spend on maintaining it).

British A&B roads tend to be through roads between towns, and form a
logical-ish structure, with B roads less busy than A roads. C-classification
is a bit more random, and tends to highlight busy roads that aren't A or B
roads. So it is entirely possible that a C road is busier than a B road.
It's also possible that a road is busy without being officially a C road. So
I think you can use the spirit of C roads to make anything busy a
"tertiary".

If you want to devise a system for recording traffic levels, I'd love to see
it (I'd suggest mvpd=xx000, where mvpd means motor-vehicles per day), but
don't try to rewrite the classification system - you'll just confuse people.

Richard

  On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com>wrote:

>
> I have used primary, secondary and tertiary to indicate relative
> traffic levels on roads in Ipswich rather than any strict
> classification. For example Landseer Road in Ipswich which is heavily
> with lorries, buses and commuters, so bad that the council have
> proposed building  a new road to 'relieve' it. I have now been asked
> to justify my tagging by another mapper who has refered to the Map
> Features page which states that secondary is only for "Administrative
> classification "secondary" in the UK, generally linking smaller towns
> and villages".
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features#Highway
>
> Ipswich on OSM
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.0538&lon=1.1763&zoom=13&layers=B000FTF
>
> My approach seems to be an approach taken elsewhere, for example in
> Bedford, where every secondary road does not have a B number?
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.1344&lon=-0.4517&zoom=13&layers=B000FTF
>
> Should we update the Map Features page or should we follow it more
> carefully?
>
>
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
>
> Peter
>
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>
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