On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Tim Francois <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm currently working on the Dempster highway with a tracklog I created > in the summer, hoping to extend it further north into NWT. The road > connecting to the Dempster in the south is the Klondike Highway. > However, this paved 'highway' is tagged as a secondary road, whilst the > unpaved Dempster is tagged as a primary road. > > I think the Klondike Highway, and other similar roads in this part of > Canada, should be tagged as primary roads. What do others think? This is a problem with the way that highways are tagged in my opinion. The OSM features page sometimes uses physical attributes to describe the roadways. The roadway needs to be tagged for the usage it is designed for. The Dempster Highway is a primary highway linking major centers. (Okay, relatively major centers, relative to barren land...) In OSM terms though, it could probably even be tagged as a trunk as it is a very important road in the area. One has to think about how the final map is going to be displayed. Most of the rendering engines use the classification of the road to determine at what level to display the way. If you classify the Dempster Highway as a track (to fit the description "gravel roads in the forest"), it will only show up once you have zoomed in so close, that you can't make any use of the map information. I have this type of problem with my GPS. I travel the highway to Fort McMurray quite often. The TeleAtlas database has the primary highway classified as a major road. If I zoom out far enough to see where I am heading, the map screen goes blank. Pretty hard to decide which roads to take when there are none depicted. Once I zoom in close enough to see the roads, I can no longer see my destination, so it is difficult to determine which road I should take to get to my desired destination. Our northern territories don't have a lot of roads, and have a lot of territory. You need to be zoomed well out to be able to see where you are and where you want to be in most cases. The roads between those locations are of major importance if you are attempting to drive between the locales, and as such should be tagged as such. Even if the classification description for the UK suggests that that road classification should be paved with striped lines, and a hard shoulder, in the Yukon, that same classification of road might only be a gravel surface. If it were up to me, classification would denote the importance of the road in the road network, and surface, number of lanes, and other tags would describe the physical attributes of the roadway. My two bits, and then some! James VE6SRV _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
