Re: [Talk-us] Highway tagging sort-of-dispute

[Greg Troxel]

Bradley White  writes:

> In urban areas, I would consider secondary to usually mean 4 lanes, 35
> mph(ish), maybe divided maybe not, with not much in the way of access
> control. Primaries are faster, more controlled and usually wider - more
> important roads in the area than secondary. Under the scheme that this
> contributor recently tagged the city with, there is no distinction between
> these roads.

This is messy.As I have read the norms, primary is for US highwways,
and secondary for state highways.  Then, classifications are adjusted
based on importance, so that a state highway that is as important as a
US highway (e.g MA 2 in massachusetts, which is as big a deal as US 20,
if not more so, is tagged as primary).

Just because a road has 4 lanes doesn't make it like a US highway.

The root of the problem is that the view of what's important in the city
is different than outside, and these have to sort of meet up.   Outside
of cities, important roads take you from one place to another place, not
across town.

> -- Secondly, in other areas, roads which were set to primary were then
> upgraded to trunk in ways I find strange next to my understanding of what a
> trunk road means in the U.S. I am under the impression that 'trunk' implies
> that the road has some sort of high-performance element to it, in that if
> the road is undivided, low-speed, and maintains access to all adjacent
> properties, it cannot possibly be a trunk road, even if it is very
> important in navigation. In Carson City (

I haven't looked, but I agree.  A trunk road is heading towards being a
motorway: it needs to be more or less three out of 4 of: mostly divided,
mostly multilane, mostly not having at-grade intersections, and mostly
limited access.  If it has driveways everywhere and lights more often
than once every mile, it's definitely not trunk.  There's a section of
MA 2 near me that is trunk, even though there are a few driveways and
side roads.  But it's like 4 things in 4 miles, and it's posted 45 with
prevailing speeds of 65-70, jersey barrier, two lanes plus breakdown,
and no light for 4 miles.   So you almost don't notice it's not a
motorway.

> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/39.1442/-119.7566), the US 50 & US 395
> temporary route is tagged trunk despite that the road is 4 lanes undivided,
> dropping as low as 25 mph and maintaining all adjacent access. It is a very

You have convinced me trunk is totally inappropriate.

> -- Finally, I have a bit of concern with some weirdness and in some cases
> sloppiness of these recent edits. In South Lake Tahoe, CA (
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/38.9292/-119.9700), the trunk tag
> seems to start and stop arbitrarily at the end of the residential areas. I
> could see the case being made that it is a trunk road up until it reaches
> SLT since it is fast and relatively  unobstructed, but in town the road is
> low speed, 4-5 lanes, undivided, maintains direct access to property, which
> again says to me 'primary'. It is clearly the most important route, but has
> no 'high-performance' elements other than lanes. The same thing happens in
> Minden, NV (http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/38.9445/-119.7417), where
> NV 88 is tagged as a trunk for a short length, as well as 395 through the
> town despite being 25 mph with no access control whatsoever. Further south,
> it seems like there was an attempt made to tag the rest of 395 as a trunk,

I think trunk/primary transitions should be more or less where you have
to slow down, where the driveways start, or the first light.  Usually
this is pretty obvious physically as your are driving.  It's also not
appropriate to have a short section be trunk.  More or less by
definition, a trunk has to have an extended period without at-grade
intersections and lights, so a section primary-trunk-primary where it's
only 0.5 miles just doesn't make sense, even if that little section is
better.

> I don't want to get into a miniature 'edit war' flipping these tags back
> and forth (the history on some of the segments of US 395 south of minden
> show that it has gone between primary and trunk a number of times since the
> creation of the way) since that is considered vandalism. I would like to
> hear some more thoughts about this though. I know that 'trunk' is a pretty
> vague term in the US, but under the assumption that it implies in some way
> a 'high-performance motorway', I don't think it's being used correctly
> here. I could be totally wrong though, which is why I'm asking for some
> opinion about what to do here. Thanks for bearing with me, I know this was
> pretty long.

Have you messaged the mapper?  I would encourage you to do that and
start up a local mailinglist.  Then you could get to the situation where
you have the consensus of the active mappers who choose to participate
in the local mapping community.  An edit labeled as such should carry a
lot more weight.

One of the broken things about 

Re: [Talk-us] Highway tagging sort-of-dispute

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 8:27 AM, Greg Troxel  wrote:

>
> Bradley White  writes:
>
> > In urban areas, I would consider secondary to usually mean 4 lanes, 35
> > mph(ish), maybe divided maybe not, with not much in the way of access
> > control. Primaries are faster, more controlled and usually wider - more
> > important roads in the area than secondary. Under the scheme that this
> > contributor recently tagged the city with, there is no distinction
> between
> > these roads.
>
> This is messy.As I have read the norms, primary is for US highwways,
> and secondary for state highways.  Then, classifications are adjusted
> based on importance, so that a state highway that is as important as a
> US highway (e.g MA 2 in massachusetts, which is as big a deal as US 20,
> if not more so, is tagged as primary).
>

True, but on the other hand, an eight lane city boulevard's probably going
to be considered a more major route than a two lane county road
intersecting it (or even parallel a few blocks over), even though the
network hierarchy would consider the county road more major.


> Just because a road has 4 lanes doesn't make it like a US highway.
>

Right, that's what the network tag on the route relation that the way
should already be a part of means.  (Have I mentioned yet, it's time to
kill ref=* on ways and go exclusively to relations for this information?)


> The root of the problem is that the view of what's important in the city
> is different than outside, and these have to sort of meet up.   Outside
> of cities, important roads take you from one place to another place, not
> across town.
>

In more rural areas, these do more or less line up.  Major cities tend to
be their own beast when it comes to this sort of thing.
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