"unless it’s somehow still used on signage" I would expect that to be the case.
With the US DOT/FHA quasi-mandatory (compliance conditional greenmail) renumberings to the revised national standard (exits keyed to mile marker, border-to-border S-N or W-E, following US Interstate route number -- some routes had exit #s based on State routes before achieving interstate numbers and so are doubly non-compliant, e.g. Mass. Rt 128 which spans I-95 & I-93 (in opposite alignments!)), there is usually a temporary add-on e.g. "Formerly Exit 8" attached to the most important signs mentioning "Exit 48" for a transitional period of year or two so that people with old maps / directions / GPS aren't totally confused. The physical "formerly" bits look like they're designed to be easy to remove later. As long as the signage says formerly, we should tag Formerly (and the routers should consider whether to include it in prompts). For anyone doing research with Mid/Late-20thC sources, having a record of the historical signage at an exit will be useful -- where was Exit 8 in the 1970's? Not where it is now by a long shot on many interstates! A GIS-friendly form of this history will be ever-more important as it recedes into deep history. Wikipedia attempts to capture the history, but not in a GIS-friendly / geo-queriable form. Whether the main OSM DB is the right long-term repository or whether a side-schema for historical overlays is the more appropriate GIS-friendly perpetual record of exit history is a separate question. (History for an exit or ramp would include opened date, re-numbered date, closed date, reconfigured date?) (As I am old as dirt, i will continue to refer to Westbrook/Portland Exit 48 as Exit 8, much as we still turn off Blackstrap Rd at the house that *used to be* white. To confuse matters, for a while it was indeed "white on this side" (only). (Thank-you, Anne, you may take off your cloak now.) B-D)
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