On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 at 15:32, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Paul, thank you for clarifying the situation in England, as much as it > can be clarified. > As with OSM tagging, it evolved. So we have things that are not ideal simply because of historical accident. If the UK were to come up with an all-new classification scheme, based on everything we now know, it would probably look a lot different. But the cost of replacing all the signage, and all the printed maps, and the knowledge in people's heads means that will never happen. If we were to redesign the human body from scratch it wouldn't have a recurrent laryngeal nerve, the epididymus would take a different route and the eyes wouldn't be wired backwards, but evolution can't do that. I'm sorry we inflicted our mess onto OSM, but that's just the way OSM evolved. BTW, that mess applies to the whole of Great Britan, not just England (things are somewhat different in Northern Ireland). Generally I'm thinking about the many countries, outside of Europe, > where the tagging system has not yet been established, and where the > government hasn't clearly categorized the highways yet. > Your original post read like you intended it to be applied globally. As a set of heuristics to apply in places where there are no official categories of roads, then go for it. I think it needs more work because the road network is a mesh with many pairs of population centres having many routes between them, some routes being longer, some routes being quicker. The preferred route from X to Y may be a detour via Z even though there is a shorter, direct route from X to Y. -- Paul
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