It would be good to get a resolution of the issue of highway classification and rendering in the USA.
The San Francisco area is getting into a pretty <http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=37.3792&lon=-121.9487&zoom=12&layers=0BFT> good state now, and could act as an 'exemplar' area for the USA should good tagging practice, however the current highway tagging and rendering is a mess and also looks wrong on the final map. I realise a bunch of you are meeting tomorrow in San Francisco for a mapping party tomorrow so though I would chuck in my thoughts first. The interstate roads are currently tagged 'motorway' and rendered blue. The state roads are currently tagged on OSM variously with trunk (green) primary (red) and secondary (orange). Some pretty major roads a tagged with secondary (actually a very lowly road class in the UK below motorway, trunk and primary) and I suspect that this is because it renders with the correct colour. There is no 'secondary_link' tag for exit and entrance ramps because secondary roads are too minor to have such things so highways rendered as secondary are using 'secondary' tags for exist and entrance ramps as well. With the current rendering people will be tempted to tag major roads as 'secondary' and get everthing into a bit of mess although others will insist on using the hierarchy correctly and ignore the non-standard colour of the resulting map. Can I propose the following: Interstate should be tagged 'motorway' and be rendered orange with a rather grand rendering of the route number as on Google maps and on other US maps. Major non-interstate highways that have traffic light free multi-level junctions etc should be tagged as 'trunk' and possibly also be rendered orange but with less grand route numbers to differentiate them from interstate routes. Major routes with multi lane traffic (2+lanes in each direction) but which stop for traffic signals and have random side roads coming in frequently are tagged 'primary' and should appear yellow and be reasonable wide. Secondary and tertiary and then available for lower tiers and should appear as yellow but be narrower. If we can agree on the rendering rules and get both Mapnik and osmarender sorted out for the USA then people will be incentivised to tag appropriately. The moto 'render and they will come' probably applies here as elsewhere. Can I suggest that you do some block changes to the highways tags over the weekend to get the tags right and (of course the colours will then be wrong) ie top roads motorway/motorway_link=blue, next level trunk/trunk_link=green, next level primary/primary_link=red and finally secondary=orange and tertiary=yellow and then ensure that the rendering rules get sorted for osmarender and mapnik . Btw, I am not on the talk-us list. I will look and he USA list on the web from time to time but so do include me in any relevant responses. I am copying this to the main list because I suspect the issue also applies to other countries around the world. Regards, Peter Miller
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