We recently discussed the confusion about unclassified vs residential recently, but a more significant issue is that different countries and regions have a wide variety of practices about assigning the major highway classes, especially trunk and primary.
In some countries, including parts of Europe and parts of the USA, highway=trunk is reserved for "expressways" or "motorroads" with certain physical characteristics. However, in England where the tag originated, highway=trunk is used for the main, non-motorway highways in the country. As can be seen by glancing at the rendering of England, these highway=trunk connect just about every place=town in England: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/53.021/-1.033 This means that highway=primary and highway=secondary is used for most other paved roads with one lane in each direction. Many place=villages in England are connected to a highway=primary and the rest have a highway=secondary. And most hamlets are on a highway=tertiary which connects to larger villages or a town. This leaves highway=unclassified for very minor roads, often too narrow for 2 wide vehicles to pass each other, connecting isolated dwellings and farms. This is how they are like residential roads, in the English system. I would like to adapt this system to Indonesia, where the government has not yet classified most roads below the National level, but the "Jalan Nasional" class of major highways has already been decided to be mapped as highway=trunk. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Indonesian_Tagging_Guidelines#Roads for an attempt. The idea is that one can determine the classification of highway based on what size of settlements it connects: trunk - connects cities to cities ("National Roads") primary - connects a town to a city or another town secondary - connects a village to a town/city or another village tertiary - connects a hamlet to a village/town or another hamlet unclassified - connect farms / isolated dwellings to a hamlet/vilage or another farm. This system is internally consistent and works well for rendering, as well as for routing. Thoughts? - Joseph (I wish I could review this with other Indonesian mappers, but we don't have an active forum or mailing list) _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
