Why was the Dollar Creek SUP changed to highway=pedestrian? This tag is not correct, please see:osm.wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpedestrian, specifically the first line stating A highway=pedestrian is a *road*" which this is not.

Reverting for reasons explained on previous edits - direct access to properties means this is not a motorway.

Similar to US 101 discussed in other changeset - this is not a freeway until closer to Cummings Skyway due to direct access to adjacent properties, which is not permitted on a freeway. Again, do not add link roads unless they exist physically separated from the main highway. Turn lanes that are not physically separated from the main travel lanes are _not_ link roads.

Hi Fluffy,
This section of road does not meet motorway standards for the following reasons:

- Direct access to multiple adjacent properties south of the interchange with San Juan Road, as well as south of CA 156 interchange.

- RIRO with public roads (Dunbarton Rd, Mallory Canyon Rd., Beatrice Dr, Victoria Ln, Tustin Rd, etc etc) - ****Please DO NOT add one-way motorway link roads where they do not physically exist!*****

Motorways by definition are fully access controlled highways (i.e., access ONLY by interchanges and grade separated ramps); this is very clearly not. As such I will be reverting this changeset.

Please also note that "Freeway Entrance" signs are not always sufficient to define a motorway - US 101 has the same freeway entrance signs at access ramps through Redwood National Park, but the highway is undivided through there which categorically rules it out as a motorway. I'm not sure where you're reading this "resembles freeway clause", but in the U.S. motorway strictly means divided, fully access controlled (access via grade-separated ramps or interchange) highways only.

Just a heads up...the "or a major intercity highway" trunk definition is fairly contentious and not commonly used. Many years ago I bumped the same handful of roads up to trunk that you recently did (101, 395, CA 70/99...) but have slowly been reverting them due to the fact that overall US consensus is that trunk should be reserved only for expressway-grade roads, in the same way that motorway is reserved for only freeway-grade roads. The majority of the US uses this definition, as well as most developed countries in OSM barring Canada and the UK as notable exceptions.

This went to debate on the talk-us mailing list sometime last year (sign up if you haven't!), and like many times before it reached an impasse between those arguing that it should be used only for expressways, and those arguing that it should be used to denote major cross-country highways (myself included, especially since CA has such a loose definition of expressway that it almost becomes meaningless to use for identifying road class) - only the debate got so out of hand it had to be shut down by the moderators. I'll leave these changes alone, but fair warning that you'll get a lot of push-back over bumping up non-expressway primary roads to trunk from the OSM community.

Again, has construction begun on this section? If not, it should not be tagged as "highway=construction" and instead as "highway=proposed".

osm.wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer

You've upgraded non-expressway portions of CA 99 & CA 70 to trunk, but have left primary sections arbitrarily where the road is 35 mph. Why? If you're upgrading these on the "major highway that a motorway doesn't service" definition, then it should carry trunk through the towns (this has a contentious background - I personally think trunk would be better used in the US as "major intercity highway" rather than "expressway", but observing the map across the country the consensus appears to be that trunk is used for "expressway" so it's the way I try to tag now. Last time this debate was had on the us-talk mailing list it got out of hand and eventually shut down...). Guidelines suggest 40 mph, but this is not a hard rule, and is more applicable for urban expressways, since rural expressways tend to be 55 mph in California. Otherwise, these stretches should remain primary.

Have you verified on the ground or with recent satellite imagery that construction has started?

Why were these sections of US 101 changed to motorway? This stretch has countless grade-level intersections (Pesante, Reese, Berta Canyon/Prunedale, etc) that disqualifies is from being a motorway. Please review tagging guidelines!

osm.wiki/United_States_roads_tagging

osm.wiki/Tag:highway%3Dmotorway

"Grade-separated highway, normally divided with 2 or more lanes in each direction. Access by ramps only."

Has ground broken to construct this roadway? If so, is there a project site or listing that provides more details? The bit of legislation posted in the note is not sufficient to add this to OSM.

US 395 is not a motorway here due to multiple at-grade intersections. I will be reverting this changeset.

One other point - while the fed functional class does classify non-state/US roads as you point out, it is usually way off the mark for local/city roads relative to the OSM scheme. The vast majority of urban arteries the federal class with list as "other principal artery" are 'secondary' or 'tertiary' in OSM, only occasionally 'primary'.

I live in Truckee - the fed functional class here lists everything but the state highways as a local road, which is patently incorrect. The functional class map, and to some degree the NHS system (especially MAP-21 roads), seem to be more based around funding and highway policy than necessarily the way OSM classifies roads.

If you haven't seen these already, here's some good references about US classification:

osm.wiki/United_States_roads_tagging

osm.wiki/United_States_Road_Classification

Some discussion about fed/state functional class systems not corresponding to OSM tags:

https://www.mail-archive.com/talk-us@openstreetmap.org/msg16988.html

https://www.mail-archive.com/talk-us@openstreetmap.org/msg03714.html

Most mappers in the US do not use the federal functional classification since it is both does not correspond well to OSM classification system and is often internally inconsistent. In my opinion, the OHP classes map much better to OSM classes and could safely be used to aid classification decisions.

And believe me, I am on the same page about secondary & state route rendering. I have been on the fence about the main roads in my current Truckee/Tahoe area for years for the same issues.

Anyways, just wanted to explain my reasoning since I am the one who made many of the changes to a region that hasn't seen a lot of love. I will happily defer to active local mappers who know the region better than I do.

For what it's worth, I think the easiest way to fix the rendering/classification problem is the US would be to ditch equating 'trunk' with "expressway", orthogonalize "expressway" with its own tag (since it's a physical attribute of a road and not a measure of importance), and make 'trunk' equal "most important cross-country routes" and then go down from there.

However, last time this was discussed on the us-talk mailing list, discussion devolved into a bloodbath that moderators eventually had to shut down. I doubt a true consensus about this issue will ever be reached in the US, but most often, 'trunk' is used for "expressway" so I am trying to tag that way as well.

Since these changesets undid a lot of the road class changes I made here, I should probably chime in. Lots of words and opinions ahead:

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I agree with mapman44 that the ODOT classifications for both highway class and expressway are generally correct by OSM standards (can't say the same for many other states!).

With the OHP Highway Class layer on:

- Red is interstate which should obviously be 'motorway'.

- Green is a "statewide" route which nearly always correspond to 'primary' roads.

- Blue is a "regional" route - these ones are trickier. If the route is the best way between two decently sized cities where no other interstate or freeway services, then it should be primary. If the route only connects small towns or is mostly paralleled by a freeway, it should be secondary. Example - OR 99W is correctly classified as a primary for being the best way to get from Eugene to Corvallis. OR99E is INcorrectly classified as a 'primary' since it connects small towns and it mostly parallels I-5 through the Willamette - it doesn't really provide routing that the interstate doesn't do better, so it should be 'secondary'. They are both "regional" routes by OHP standards.

- Brown is a "district" route - these are nearly by definition 'secondary' roads ("A highway which is not part of a major route, but nevertheless forming a link in the national route network."). OR 238, a "district" route, is now incorrectly classified as a 'primary' when it should be 'secondary' - its function is mostly to connect Jacksonville, a mid-sized town, to more important roads. It is not an important, cross-country route, nor a major city artery, but instead a link in the network of more major roads. Ashland to Klamath Falls is right on the knife-edge of the primary/secondary divide, but ultimately I decided on secondary because OR 140 is the more important route, and provides a roughly similar network function (Rogue Valley <-> Klamath).

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If 'primary' is going to be used in the US to mean "most important roads in network", then there is overuse of 'primary' in the US. These should be routes that either facilitate major cross-country travel where interstates don't, or are a small handful of the most significant arteries in a major city, whose alignment accomodates significant circulation where no freeway or expressway reaches. Notably, this is why I downgraded OR 99 from Ashland through northern Medford to 'secondary' - the 'primary' route through here is Interstate 5, and theortically OR 99 could be cut off between towns (Phoenix, Talent, etc) without causing TOO much of an issue, since again I-5 is the main artery through here.

I think a major factor in contributors being eager to use 'primary' for any decently major road is one, that it renders like it 'should', and two, to distinguish them from overclassified minor roads:

- (Opinions ahead!) On point one, I don't think the main OSM slippy map properly represents US roads when the mostly-consensual US classification scheme is correctly used. A better US renderer would render state and US routes at lower zooms regardless of OSM class - this is a discussion for a different time, but the point is, don't choose a higher class for a road simply so it shows up 'better' on the slippy map.

- Point two, many areas have waaaay too many minor routes classified too high. I think this stems from TIGER import classifing a ton of driveways and private services roads as residental, and then going from there. In rural areas, driveways (included shared) should be 'service', minor roads that provide local (often dead-end) access to residences are 'residential', minor roads/highways that collect rural traffic (most rural roads) are 'unclassified', and county-level highways that connect small towns or collect traffic towards region-level routes ('secondary's) should be 'tertiary'. Before jumping to 'primary', it's best to make sure adjacent roads aren't overclassified in the first place. Too often every two-lane road in a rural area with a center stripe is tagged 'tertiary', when many/most of them should be 'unclassified'.

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Moving on to 'trunk', the consensus in the US is that 'trunk' should be used for expressways. These are usually high-speed, divided, limited access highways. In the mountainous west, it is not always physically possible to meet these requirements, so usually the way you distinguish an expressway is by access control - limited, if any, access to adjacent properties, intersections with a limited number of roads, occasional grade-seperated interchanges. The OHP Expressway layer in TransGIS nails this pretty well, and nearly every length road it lists as an expressway should be 'trunk' - even the two-lane roads, so long as you have verified that they have high access control.

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Finally, I would caution against relying much on traffic counts to make classification decisions. Most major rural highways have much smaller traffic counts than any arbitrary urban artery, but the former is usually 'primary' while the latter is usually 'secondary'. Traffic counts are a consideration, but shouldn't be TOO much of a deciding factor.

This document doesn't state anything about "(Heavy Traffic Route)" being part of the highway name. Where is this coming from? Descriptions about the road don't belong in the name field.

Hello nemestrinus,

I noticed this changeset as well as a few others (69630583 for example) added 'bridge=yes' and 'layer=1' to large sections of a few trails and roads around the June Lake area. Please review your recent edits here to correct this. Thank you!

Bradley

Hello,
I noticed that this changeset set the far eastern section of CA 4 back to motorway. I believe this to be incorrect. Specifically:

- The RIRO intersection with WB CA 4 and Sycamore Ave is not physically divided (current ways in OSM are incorrect) which is not up to freeway standards in the US.

- The start/end points of the current trunk section on EB CA 4 as currently tagged are arbitrary, and there is no "End Freeway" or "Begin Freeway" signage as is typically in CA for point-failures of unfinished freeways (see: CA 99 & Sankey Rd, CA 149 & Shippee Rd, CA 17 & La Madrona/El Rancho) - evidence that this section is an expressway rather than a freeway.

See also:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_4
"The road is an expressway from its starting point until it approaches Martinez, at which point it becomes a full freeway"

- https://www.cahighways.org/001-008.html#004
"However, it is not up to full freeway standards: many intersections are full right turns instead of gentle on- and off-ramps"

- http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tsip/hseb/crs_map/05k.pdf
State highways built to full freeway standards are nearly always classified as "Other Fwy or Expwy" on CA functional class maps; this section is not.

Motorway (and trunk, depending on who you're talking to) is the only 'highway' tag that is applied solely based on the physical attributes of the road. All roads that meet the physical standard for a freeway, regardless whether they are interstates, U.S. highways, state, county, municipal, etc... get the 'motorway' tag.