Re: [Talk-ca] Highway recoding

[Paul Norman]

On 1/28/2016 10:31 AM, Ken Wuschke wrote:
So a suggestion to a definition for trunk routes in Canada could be a 
simple as:


*A highway=trunk is a roadway that is a part of the National
Highway System as defined by the Council of Ministers
Responsible for Transportation and Highway Safety and is found
in annually updated document called **Canada’s National
Highway System Annual Report.*



I don't see that we should be depending on a government definition 
within OSM. Additionally, this would lead to unexpected results if you 
look at the feeder routes in the lower mainland.



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Re: [Talk-ca] Highway recoding

[Ken Wuschke]

Morning Daniel,

First, I really appreciated your comprehensive email. It provided me with a
lot of background on this topic.

As to my level of employment within the Ministry of Transportation and
Highways, I was on the operations end and dealt directly with the public.
Through this I quickly learnt and understood how the public perceives the
roading infrastructure in British Columbia. A perspective which can be
quite different from the engineering point of view. Hence I focus on
functionality of roads versus the design profile of a road. For the most
part the public does not care nor understand the difference between a
highway's cross section other than they can generally travel faster when
there is four lanes versus two lanes. Their focus is more about getting
places directly and quickly.

But I am going to step back from defining trunk routes in Canada for a
moment and focus on coming to OSM as a new person. Quite frankly the OSM
wiki is not clear nor well connected and it offers a lot of room for
improvement so that newcomers can learn what is the consensus based on
years of discussion. In the case of Canadian trunk status the wiki leaves a
lot to be desired.

1. On the highest level page *Tag:highway=trunk*
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtrunk Canada is not
mentioned in the table called *International equivalence*. Nor is there a
link to be found to get a person to the Canadian definitions for OSM. When
comparing through the countries that are listed in the table it ranges from
design specs of a road profile (i.e. Vietnam) to it is based solely on does
the road in question have a route number (i.e. Hong Kong). For the Canadian
OSM volunteer this leaves a huge room for interpretation. Therefore,
regardless of what the OSM community consensus is for Canadian trunk route
standards by not having a definition on this page nor a link to a
definition the new OSM volunteer is floundering in the dark.

To make it easier, I feel the *International equivalence *table be
abandoned and simply a link to the *Highway:International equivalence* page
- http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence. As
OSM is mainly volunteers there is far less work in maintaining one table
then maintaining several tables.


2. On the *Canadian tagging guidelines* page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Trunk has a
link to an unnamed document of the NHS inventory, however clicking on that
link simply takes the OSM volunteer to a blank page. Further there is no
mention that some provinces on the OSM wiki have further tagging
guidelines. I only learnt this through Paul Norman's email earlier in this
thread.

3. On the *Canada:British Columbia* guidelines page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada:British_Columbia#Highways_and_provincial_roads
trunk roads are defined differently from the Canadian standard. Instead of
using the National Highway System as defined by the Council of Ministers
defining a trunk road is more about whether or not it is a divided highway.
In addition, this page does not refer to the BC Ministry of Transportation
and Infrastructure's document *Overview of B.C. Highway Functional
Classification.*

As you can see there is a lot of confusion not just with the definition but
with how to access the information and how the guideline changes from a
provincial to a national guideline page on the OSM wiki. If you can make
suggestions on how to improve this situation I would welcome them.

To be frank this level of confusion just encourages me to stop contributing
to OSM. I can imagine there are more people out there like me. Life is too
short for this type of frustration, let alone on a volunteer level.

Getting back to the definition. I found this document by the BC Ministry of
Transportation and Infrastructure of great interest - *Overview of B.C.
Highway Functional Classification* /
https://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/planning/Provincial%20Highways/BC_Numbered_Hwy_Functional_Classes.pdf
- In it discusses five levels of functionality class. While it does not
discuss trunk route, it does provide primary, secondary, major, minor, and
local roads. But then it tosses in something that could be subscribed to as
a trunk road:

*The “National Highway System” (NHS) is a subset of primary highways which
have been deemed to be of national importance, and therefore which have
higher expectations placed on them regarding mobility, reliability,
geometric standards and condition. *


This is very close to the OSM definition on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Trunk -

*A highway=trunk is a roadway that has limited access and is part of the
national highway system, as defined by the Council of Ministers, an
intergovernmental agency with representatives from each province and
territory. Maintenance of these highways is under provincial jurisdiction.*


*The surface=* does not need to be paved, nor is it assumed to be paved. As
in 

[Talk-ca] weeklyOSM 288

[Jinal Foflia]

The weekly round-up of OSM news, issue # 288 is now available online in
English, giving as always a summary of all things happening in the
OpenStreetMap world:

  http://www.weeklyosm.eu/archives/6731


*Highlights of the weeklyOSM edition 288*

   - Want to know what's in store with the next Vespucci release? ...
   - Pascal Neis writes an interesting blog on how to find suspicious
   changesets ...
   - Mapbox created two OpenSource and free tools for better maps: OSMLint
   (For quality analysis of OSM data) and OSM Comments (To track conversations
   in OpenStreetMap) ...
   - 10 interesting things you need to know about OpenStreetMap ...
   - New to OSM? There is a training module for you ...
   - Do you want to know more about the rare optical phenomenon (streets in
   Sky), read in here for more information ..

   Enjoy!

weeklyOSM is brought to you by ...
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WeeklyOSM

Regards,

Jinal Foflia
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