https://imgur.com/a/qNROb4E

When a mapping service chooses to pay for the rights for the street data and navigation they turn to the government, the state government hand over the map of their roads and classifications of the roads. The government of South Australia has given this information to the OpenStreetMap project for free all that needed to be done is for someone to translate the data onto the map. I was that person, and it has done nothing except for russle peoples jimmys all the way to the OSM board. The classification of roads goes way beyond a single dictionary meaning and has lots of different considerations such as traffic volume, width of the road, whether there are hazards such as railway crossings that the roads are engineered to avoid, speed, intersections etc. Thankfully the people who plan and engineer the roads take all of this into consideration and classify roads accordingly to what the intention of the road actually is. As far as OSM is concerned none of this matters and “what someone thinks it is from the ground” is far far more important and accurate. I 100% get that when this project started not a single government anywhere in the world gave this information over to the project and OSM needed to come up with some meaning and right and wrong way to classify roads. So the project decided on “Use highway=secondary to tag highways which are not part of major routes, but nevertheless form a link in the national route network. Secondary highways are generally specified by country road classification bylaws”. Which is fine and people were happy with that… but it leaves out a situation where. what if a government somewhere comes along and says “heres what our roads are feel free to use this” well what you see in the above screenshot happens, OSM does not allow for Real factual official government data to be allowed and I think this needs to change.