On Fri, 27 May 2011 12:17:53 -0400, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
The 'major intercity' road ought to be tagged as primary unless
there's
a specific reason to upgrade, IMO. That leaves the data more useful
to
end users.
Actually that leaves it less useful for users in cities, as then
there are only two classifications for non-intercity highways,
secondary and tertiary.
Uh, what are you on about? Motorway itself doesn't necessarily imply
intercity or intracity, and neither do any of the other classifications.
I can think of several intercity county roads that ought not qualify for
anything beyond unclassified (they're old routes with several bypasses)
and several intracity routes that definitely ought to be classified as
trunk or motorway. It comes down to how the highway is built and what
the highway is.
Also, I don't know how major a road between Dumas, TX and Texline,
TX
really is. If it weren't a US highway, I'd probably demote it all
the
way to secondary.
It's on the National Highway System, meaning the FHWA considers it to
be a major road. It's probably the best route between Kansas City and
Albuquerque.
I'm going to assume you mean 'best non-Interstate route'. Most of it
isn't even four laned yet, although Texas has some of it under
construction. Same goes for the segment between Clayton, NM and I-25,
although there New Mexico is upgrading the road to four lane divided in
one whack. Which, as an aside, makes for one incredibly long
construction zone.
Talking solely about relatively rural areas, it seems to me that by
default the best non-motorway route between two regionally important
cities should be tagged primary unless there's a reason to upgrade it to
trunk based on the physical characteristics of the road. To me, trunk
implies a divided 4 lane at worst, or arguably including a true super 2,
of which I've seen a couple in Kansas (I think one of Oklahoma's
turnpikes might also be a true super 2, but I haven't driven it
personally). It just makes sense to me based on the way we build our
roads here in the US.
I maintain that tagging both two lane and four lane divided roads as
trunk (not to mention the cases where it's used for a
not-quite-a-motorway) makes the map much less useful for planning a
route at a glance. Obviously, software can take the maxspeed and lanes
tags into account when available but if I'm, for example, looking at
some rendered tiles, that information is not available.
We already have four other tags to indicate importance in a route
network, so I don't see the downside to limiting trunk to roads where
the physical characteristics imply a higher classification, as we
already do with motorway.
-wierdo
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
