The disagreement here is whether Ely counts as a "major population center" in the sense that it will induce the main E/W route to 'trunk'. In my opinion, maybe, but probably not. We're talking about upgrading 400+ miles of highway to 'trunk' on account of one town with less than 4,000 people. This is a super duper edge case with respect to the trunk definition given in the 2021 Highway Classification wiki page, which has had a considerable amount of voices in developing.

I'm not 100% opposed to this being upgraded, but the discussion needs to happen first and with more voices than just you and I, given the "edgeness" of it. Until that happens, yes, I am insisting that this keeps the same classification it has had for the last 12 years.

Yes, Ely is a "major" stop on the route between Las Vegas and Twin Falls - US 93 is a "trunk" because it is the best route between Las Vegas and Twin Falls, Boise, etc; not because Ely is a stop on the way. US 50 through NV carries *regional* traffic to regionally important population centers, but definitely not traffic between any two major metropolitan areas.

My objection is that one of the things settled on with the 2021 reclassification guidelines is that 'trunk' routes should be used to denote the "best" routes connecting major population centers. US 50 through Nevada isn't used preferentially to connect any two major population centers - I don't really agree that Ely counts as a 'trunk'-level destination, but I'm willing to hear others' perspectives on that specifically.

My point in bringing up the classification guidelines is that the bigger the change, the more there needs to be an effort to get some consensus. The point of making the effort to document all this (and to generally stick with the decisions made) is so other mappers can see the logic as to why a certain piece of road was decided on belong to a certain class, give a framework to discuss with other mappers if there's a disagreement, and hopefully, most importantly, stop switching road classifications back and forth ad nauseum.

Hello,
Please note the long-distance 'trunk' network, at least for CA & NV, has been mostly settled for a couple years now - see documentation here:
osm.wiki/Nevada/highway_classification
osm.wiki/California/2022_Highway_Classification_Guidelines

Major road classification changes in particular have been a source of "spirited"
disagreement in the past, so getting some community buy-in, especially for 'trunk' roads, is greatly recommended. The OSM community forum (https://community.openstreetmap.org) as well as the US Slack channel area both active. I will be reverting this classification upgrade, as well as 395 north of Alturas, pending discussion with the community.

Hi there,
This stretch of Pyramid Hwy is significantly more important than nearby 'secondary' roads and does not belong in the same "bin". It is one of the most heavily trafficked surface arteries in the metropolitan area and is slated for an expressway upgrade soon. I understand the goal is to have a connected classification network, but we're getting into silly territory here where a 55 mph, multi-lane, partially controlled access highway with an AADT of nearly 40k is classified under, for example, W 7th/E Golden Valley, a windy 2-lane back-ish road with under 10k AADT.

Hi there,
Would like to second the comment above - this does not meet 'motorway' standards for CA. There was a considerable effort a couple years ago to enumerate all motorway and trunk roads in the state, please see the following:

osm.wiki/California/2022_Highway_Classification_Guidelines

osm.wiki/California/Freeway_ends

Hi there,
It seems this changeset added a 'highway=path' tag or equivalent to any of the XC pistes operated by Tahoe XC that didn't already have one. To my knowledge riding in this area, many of these XC pistes don't have any trail they're following in the summer, and summer-use heatmaps (ie, Strava cycling & running) don't show any use over these routes in the summer either. When these pistes don't follow any underlying road or trail, they should not carry a 'highway=' tag with them, just the 'piste=' tags. Ski piste tags will not render on the main OSM tile map since ski runs are considered out of scope for the main renderer.

Best,
Bradley

To be clearer about roads being tagged 'private' here - they should be, and the reason that those changes were reverted was because the data working group reverted the entire change history of your account because of the mass data deletion. I would be happy to retag everything here as 'private', but removing valid landcover (natural/landuse) will simply be reverted again.

If you wanted to add all that you could - I think that would be overkill personally, but there's nothing stopping you. But the question here isn't what ought to be added, but whether things should be *removed* because they're on private property, and the answer to that is no, barring the sensitive edge cases given in the wiki articles you have been sent. The data added here isn't functionally much of a different 'representation' than the countless satellite images that exist to be viewed freely online. You're right that nothing to the north has been mapped to this level of detail yet, but that's mostly just because nobody has gotten around to it yet. For a close example, the Martis Peak/Juniper Creek Ranch neighborhoods also have extensive private forest roads that are mostly all in OSM. The easement/access issues you describe I assure can be found in numerous other rural areas that are also in OSM. That is the purpose of the 'access' tag. If the roads are physically posted as 'no trespassing'/'private', then they ought to be tagged as such in OSM, which will render them as private roads on the tile map and prevent anyone from being routed over them with the navigational tools. But no map or online tool ever stopped anyone from ignoring posted signage and driving in places they obviously shouldn't, which has been a problem in this area long before OpenStreetMap has even existed and won't be stopped by deleting data.

Hello,
First and foremost, I am sorry about the trespass and vanadlism problems that you are experiencing on your property. I have driven around this area for the better part of a decade now and while I share your frustrations about the inability of some folks to respect posted closures (and otherwise respect common sense courtesies), I don't have a financial consequence for the misbehavior of others, and again I am sorry that you are dealing with these problems. With that being said, it is a foundational principal of OSM to map that which is "on the ground" - the data that I have added was done so using publicly available satellite imagery and was not acquired by any trespass. Here is one article addressing why private roads are not subject to removal from OSM simply because they are on private property: osm.wiki/Why_we_won%27t_delete_roads_on_private_property. If there are errors in the data please feel free to correct them, but they must correspond to the situation as it exists "on the ground". For example, the short stretch of Russell Valley Rd through the SE corner of the private inholding in this area was marked as private by an edit of yours, but in reality (at least approaching from the east) there are no 'No Trespassing' or equivalent signage - just "right to pass by permission" signage which, by my understanding (https://www.bullivant.com/right-to-pass-by-permission-sign-may/), prevents a future party from claming an adverse easement over the road rather than closing access completely to the public. As I understand it, this is a legal particularity unique to California, where this signage/legal precedent is designed to balance the desire to allow public access to undeveloped land while protecting the private landowner from legal troubles in future development (posting the signage prevents a future party from claiming an easement). Hopefully this is understandable and I am happy to discuss further.

Best,
Bradley

There has been a big push away from using 'trunk' based on the physical characteristic of the road, instead being used for "most important" routes - best interregional routes between large (city+ size) settlements. Primary is generally used for regionally important roads. Most of these major, interregional routes have been agreed upon for this state (see osm.wiki/California/2022_Highway_Classification_Guidelines) - though this list isn't set in stone, these state highways in the foothills are regionally important but don't serve any major interregional route (ie, say, Redding to Reno) so it would be a tough sell. But upgrading just this section because it is an expressway would be incorrect (see 'trunk' section of osm.wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance)

If you're concerned about expressway sections being visible, you might try the osm-americana style (https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=10.06/37.8384/-120.606) which renders 'expressway=yes' sections with a double-casing as is more typical on US-style highway maps. I use this style to check that expressway tagging is correct at a glance.

Hi Tim,
I responded on the previous changeset, but I will respond again here. There is essentially universal consensus in the US that a highway with zero grade-separated intersections and numerous driveways accessing properties directly cannot be a freeway/motorway. Please see osm.wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance for more info. I would also encourage you to post to the US community forum if you would like more discussion regarding what qualifies as a freeway/motorway: https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/communities/us/78.

Because this section categorically does not meet the criteria in the guidance above, which was arrived at after years of community discussion and represents the best consensus we have in the US so far, I will be reverting this again and will escalate further attempts to tag this section as 'motorway'.

Best,
Bradley

It is divided, but it is not grade separated - i.e., intersections with other roads are at the same grade as the main highway. Likewise, there is little to no access control - the road provides direct access to abutting properties (driveways to private residences, farms, etc). These features are both prohibited in a freeway/'motorway' design.

Hello,
This changeset bumped the expressway section of CA 120/108 up to 'motorway', which is incorrect. 'Motorway' is only used for freeways - divided highways with fully access control and grade separation, which standard this section does not meet. As such, I will be reverting this back to 'primary'.

I'm in my work week right now and don't have the mental energy to burn on writing a full response to all these points at the moment - I have been thinking about it a lot and can see where you're coming from, but I would like to get some more voices from around the community on this since I think you and I can happily talk in circles around a disagreement like this as has happened in the past. Specifically, where do we draw the line between 'town' and 'suburb', what does it mean for a place to be "distinct" and does that matter for place classification, and to what extent should CDP boundaries have a "say" in how we tag in OSM. I'll probably post to the Slack at some point in the next handful of days and tag you in the discussion.

Not in total disagreement with a lot of this - and the more I try to think about classifying population centers, the more it feels like turtles all the way down - but here are some of my thoughts:

- For incorporated areas, where exactly the administrative boundary lies can skew the "official" population pretty heavily. For example, Fernley has a much larger population than Fallon on paper, but Fernley's incorporated boundary is pretty huge compared to Fallon's, which is quite small. There's a lot of population that would consider themselves to be part of Fallon that isn't being counted. I'd be willing to bet at a glance that Fallon's official population would increase 50-100% if it had as generous an incoporated boundary as Fernley.

- For unincorporated CDPs, I think it's important to keep in mind that the primary purpose of defining a CDP is for statistical clustering for analyical purposes - while CDPs generally map to something recognizable on the ground, they don't necessarily correspond to distinct settlements, or occasionally even anything folks that live in the area would recognize as a "place". For example, many of the CDPs around east shore Tahoe and in the rural areas of Minden-Gardnerville are just subdivided rural neighborhoods that got clustered as a CDP for whatever reason. Lakeridge, Skyland, East Valley, Ruhenstroth, etc aren't distinct settlements in the same way that Genoa or Wadsworth is. I've spent years working in Minden and never once heard someone say they live in "Ruhenstroth". There's no signage or anything corresponding to that naming either. I'd have to guess that's what the subdivision is named on the assessor maps, but it isn't something that anyone refers to in practice, which is why I'm not huge on using Census Bureau data as a 1-1 map of where "places" exist in the US. That isn't the function of defining CDPs.

- Population is only one factor in the "importance" of a place. I think it's important to consider the level of services a settlement has to offer - ie, someone that lives in a 'hamlet' may or may not have gas and will have to drive to the nearest 'village' to find a small hardware store, someone in a 'village' will have to go to the nearest 'town' to find emergency care, and someone from a 'town' will probably have to go to a 'city' to attend higher education. The reason I downgraded Wadsworth (will most likely bump that one back up due to tribal services there) is that there are nearly no facilities in the town. This is also why I downgraded the settlements around N Lake - someone living in Cedar Flat where there are zero facilities will need to drive to Tahoe City or Kings Beach to get gas or groceries. A bedroom community of 1,000 with only a gas station and a convienience store shouldn't be, in my opinion, classified the same as a small town of 500 with a bank, library, a motel or two, etc.

- I strongly disagree that a 'suburb' (as we use the term in OSM) needs to be inside of an incorporated boundary. Incorporation boundaries often say more about state and local politics than they do where a city starts and stops, in the common "sense" of the term. If you're using NY's boroughs as a "perfect example" of correct use of 'suburb', this is incorrect - these are official administrative units in NYC with distinct boundaries, which we have 'place=borough' specifically to describe. Where 'town', 'village', 'hamlet' are used to classify places in a rural context, these imply to me at least *something* that functions or looks like an "incorporated" place or a "distinct settlement", whether they are legally or not, as opposed to urbanized place tags 'suburb', 'quarter', 'neighbourhood' which are fuzzier. Geographically, Sun Valley is a distinct place, but it lacks any kind of "center" in the urban or legal context, aside from being the only (NA usage) suburb of Reno/Sparks with its own address. I think it is the closest edge case because of those reasons for sure. But it's hard to see how Sun Valley and, say, Truckee ought to share the same 'place' classification when one has almost full services and the other has only a strip mall or two. Spanish Springs is not a distinct settlement - again, a CDP does not necessarily define a distinct settlement. It is a suburb of Sparks, even in the OSM sense of the word, with no distinct center or boundary. All these CDPs north of Reno/Sparks blur into the urban fabric of Reno/Sparks, the lines only existing in the Census Bureau because of Reno and Sparks' odd patchwork incorporation boundary.

Hello,
I noticed this changeset bumped the US 97 expressway section through Klamath Falls up to 'motorway'. Half of this stretch of road is undivided (some of it a two-lane road) which categorically precludes it from being tagged as a 'motorway' by US OSM standards - must be a fully access-controlled divided highway. I would encourage you to discuss with the #local-oregon channel of the OSM US Slack channel (osmus.slack.com) as I know there has been a lot of discussion about highway classification in the state there.

Thanks,
Bradley

Hello,
Thanks for the catch - these were tracing guide lines that I forgot to remove. I’ll try to delete them as soon as I can but I’ll be away from my desktop for the next couple days.
Bradley

Hi,
What's going on with the road classification changes in this area? The 'highway' tag is used to indicate the relative importance of a road in the overall network and should generally form a coherent network, not switch between primary/secondary/tertiary based on (what I can only guess is) some physical property of the road.

Reverting - OSM is not for advertisement