On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:58:51 -0300 Fernando Trebien <fernando.treb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I queried place=hamlet in Washington State using Overpass Turbo and > compared it with the current classification in OSM. Indeed, many such > places lie next to major highways, as is the pattern in other > countries (small communities tend to sprout near them). But there are > many that do not. For example, Nilles Corner [1] and Osborne Corner > [2] in Douglas County do not. What is generally expected is that the > main route between them is made of ways whose class is > highway=unclassified or higher. The route may overlap with routes > between more important places, say Niles Corner to Fairview [3] whose > main route overlaps with the tertiary WA-17 highway, which (as > generally expected from highway=tertiary) is the main route between a > pair of place=village: Bridgeport [4] and Coulee City [5]. What's > interesting about the roads that connect Nilles Corner and Osborne > Corner is that they do not connect any pair of place=village or > higher, so there's no reason to classify them as any higher than > unclassified. There could be a really nice multi-lane highway between > them, but very few people would be using it. (Of course, there is none > because the demand is very low.) When you did your query for hamlets, I'm afraid you ran headlong into a quirk of American political geography. Historically, the postal service would only deliver mail to buildings within a certain distance of a post office, while people further away would be responsible for visiting the post office to pick their mail up. As a result, it was quite common for a group of farmers or ranchers to get together and have themselves declared a community in order to get a post office. There are thousands of these "paper communities" scattered across the country, and they don't exist to any degree beyond the minimum necessary to make someone else responsible for delivering the mail. Many of them don't even exist to that extent any more, and are merely names on the map. (It's also somewhat misleading to say that Del Rio Road and Y Road connect Nilles Corner to Osborne Corner. Rather, they were built to connect the farms in the area to the Grand Coulee/Coulee Dam/Electric City area, incidentally providing access between Nilles Corner and Osborne Corner.) -- Mark _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
