Mateusz Konieczny wrote: > quality. In area with poor infrastructure road forming main road > network, of the highest importance in region should be tagged > highway=trunk - no matter whatever is is high-quality asphalt road or > unsurfaced tract unusable after major rains.
I generally agree on all the points you mentioned, but I had to mention two points to this, one on a detail and the second on what is it that the text should or shouldn't try to convey to the readers. 1) I'd say that since "trunk" is the next best thing below motorway, in any country (or "region") there has to be something between motorway standards and "unsurfaced tract unusable after major rains" - primary is a valid long distance road, too. I'm not even saying a trunk road could't be unpaved, or that it couldn't be repeatedly blocked "sometimes". I did ask on the wiki highway=trunk tag discussion page in 2009 whether anyone knows any roads marked as trunk in osm which are unpaved, and only later read somewhere that south of Sahara most trunk roads are unpaved, but in that discussion there was no mention of whether they are (generally) "usable" after major rains. I would however be confident enough to assume that no country, no matter how underprivileged, doesn't have some longer distance roads that are traversable after and during common adverse conditions; then if other long distance roads are not equal, they'd be a step down from that trunk level, even it the better roads do not cover the whole country. This can, however, possibly, clash with countries' own osm tagging guidelines if they only use some administrative class as the base for what is a trunk and what isn't - I don't know enough details about all the countries. Does anyone have examples? 2) This gets a little philosophical, because it's about what makes a road a road. It's somewhat misleading to write that the highway tag doesn't say _anything_ about the quality, when it's easily read as "doesn't say anything about the physical properties" - a road is, IMO, by definition something that looks like a road and works like a road (and in western world necessarily also: built as a road), not any strip of land where somebody once drove through, so it does describe the limits of what the physical properties can be expected to be, i.e. the list of worst possible attributes that it needs to fulfill for people call it a road. At the moment, I don't have a ready sentence to add, but it's worth noting that the concept of "a road" includes both usage and physical appearance. -- alv _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
