Okay, this is going to be a long message, but I’d strongly suggest you read ALL 
of it before responding.

I’d first like to address the assumption that some people seem to have that 
those who support using trunk on roads other than divided highways are “tagging 
for the renderer” because we allegedly just want to see these roads appear at 
lower zoom levels. For me, that is NOT the case at all.

In reality, I support having trunk for major intercity highways because there 
needs to be more levels of indicating importance for US highways than just 
primary. For example, in Nevada, US 50 and US 6 are very lightly-traveled roads 
that only connect a few small towns in Nevada, and are known for having very 
little traffic. Tagging them as primary is perfectly fine IMO. However, US 95 
connects the two biggest cities in Nevada—Las Vegas and Reno—but it’s also 
tagged as primary. Surely US 95 between Vegas and Reno is more important than 
US 6 and US 50, right?

In my home state of Washington, there are two US routes that cross the Cascade 
Mountains, US 12 and US 2, both currently tagged as primary. Both of these 
roads are kept open in winter thru the Cascades. However, there is another road 
that crosses the Cascades, WA 20, that is also currently tagged as primary 
(which makes sense given that it is a very important cross-state highway), but 
it is NOT kept open in the winter. It doesn’t make any sense that a road that 
is not open in the winter is tagged at the same importance level as other roads 
that are kept open in the winter!

Secondly, I think some things from the wiki need to be pointed out here. On the 
wiki page for Key:highway, [1] the definition of highway=trunk is “The most 
important roads in a country's system that aren't motorways. (Need not 
necessarily be a divided highway.)” Those who say “Trunk roads should ONLY be 
divided highways, no ifs, ands, or buts” are going against what is explicitly 
stated on the wiki page for key:highway. 

Also, at the bottom of the aforementioned wiki page, there is a section 
entitled "Assumptions,” which states in the first paragraph: 

“Only highway=motorway/motorway_link implies anything about quality. Other road 
types, from highway=trunk through highway=tertiary to 
highway=residential=residential/service or highway=path/footway/cycleway/track 
do not imply anything about road quality.” 

These words speak for themselves. 

Now, if we want to indicate road quality in some way (e.g. whether a road is 
divided or not), we ought to use the expressway=* tag like others have 
suggested rather than using the highway=trunk tag just for that. 

Even if you don’t use the expressway tag, you can still tell if a trunk road is 
divided or not because the default render shows divided roads as having a 
thicker line than undivided roads. A good example can be seen by looking at 
western Canada, where the most important intercity roads are tagged as trunk 
regardless of whether they’re divided or not. [3] You can clearly tell if a 
road is divided or not even if undivided roads are tagged as trunk because the 
divided roads have a thicker line than the undivided. Therefore, it is not 
necessary to reserve highway=trunk for divided roads only.

TL;DR I support tagging undivided roads as trunk because 1) some US routes are 
more important than others and lumping them all as primary doesn’t make any 
sense; 2) the wiki says that only the motorway designation implies anything 
about quality of the road; and 3) the renderer shows divided roads with a 
thicker line than undivided roads. 

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Roads
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Assumptions
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/51.618/-112.972

From: Greg Troxel
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2019 1:16 PM
To: Paul Johnson
Cc: Mike N; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Trunk VS primary,

Paul Johnson <[email protected]> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 7:24 AM Mike N <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>    I think many of the trunk VS motorway VS primary conflicts come from
>> 2 points of view:  on the one hand, people like to zoom out and see a
>> coherent network of interconnected roads.
>
> In which case, rendering based on network on the route relations would be
> more appropriate.

This is the crux of the matter.  Calling things trunk so they render is
tagging for the renderer in a bad way.

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