> Unless being a surface expressway (trunk) or fully controlled freeway > (motorway), I tend to qualify anything that averages 7+ lanes as primary, > 5-6 lanes as secondary or primary, 4-5 lanes as secondary, 2-3 lanes as > tertiary, when otherwise not otherwise being a state (secondary) or federal > (primary) highway.
This is what the "lanes" tag is for. Trunk/primary/secondary/tertiary is not necessarily about quality or usage - it is fundamentally about road network importance. There are many extremely important roads in the U.S. that are only 2 lanes. High lane counts, high speed limits, or expressway-like features can be indicative of a a higher classification, but it is not conclusive. There is a long article on the wiki about road classification being fundamentally about network importance and not road characteristics. One way I like to think about it when deciding is to imagine if the segment of road in question popped out of existence - how much of an impact would it have? Does it simply mean a mile or two detour, or will it now take hours longer to get from major city center to another major city center? How many people would be cut-off from the rest of the world if the road disappeared? I agree for the most part with your point about road classifications in the U.S. being stacked too high; especially, it seems the "primary" tag is over-saturated. At least on the west coast of the U.S., however, I think there is an under-utilization of trunk classification as well as unclassified. The former, because we still don't have an agreed/uniform definition of "trunk" for the U.S.; the latter, probably because it is not rendered distinctly anywhere but one zoom level. Tagging by road quality or characteristic leads to the weirdness that is present at lower zoom levels, where trunk roads pop in and out of existence in the middle of nowhere. This is worthless for cross-country navigation, which is what motorways and trunks are about. I could talk about this ad nauseum, but I'm getting off topic now. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
