OpenStreetMap
I’ve been going around Oregon and marking roads as tertiary. The TIGER import generally gave most roads highway=residential. I’ve been trying to mark tertiary roads as ones that have a painted centerline.
The Mapquest OSM view is nice for this since it shows tertiary roads at one higher zoom level than Mapnik. That lets me see a larger area at a time.
My usual workflow is to download an area, get Bing imagery and then mark the roads. Since it’s a real pain to select a road then add two tags (highway=tertiary and lanes=2), I added a button to JOSM. To do that, I’ve created an XML file with the following (forgive my markup)
<presets> <item name=”Mark Tiger Reviewed”> <key key=”tiger:reviewed”/> </item> <item name=”bridge”> <key key=”bridge” value=”yes”/> <key key=”layer” value=”1”/> </item> <item name=”Make Tertiary”> <key key=”highway” value=”tertiary”/> <key key=”lanes” value=”2”/> </item> </presets>
Use the Preferences–>Map Settings to include your XML file. Then go to Preferences–>Presets and add them to the toolbar as buttons. Voila. Now if only Java didn’t quit drawing ways between points randomly….
Discussion
Comment from Vincent de Phily on 19 October 2012 at 09:09
I’d say the “does the road have a painted centerline ?” test is not a good way to distinguish residential/tertiary/unclassified, as there are plenty of counter-examples.
Residential is for roads that have a lot of houses lining it (surprise ! :p) and that are not otherwise significant for routing. Unclassified is the same without the houses. Once it becomes “significant”, tag as tertiary. Yes it gets subjective, but there’s no good way to avoid that. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_Road_Classification for the US.
That said, thanks for the presets tutorial.
Comment from Mele Sax-Barnett on 19 October 2012 at 18:52
@Vincent: I think the reason why Dion uses the yellow centerline rule (I do as well) is because it’s an easy, non-subjective way to tell that there is enough traffic on the road that the Department of Transportation has decided it needs to paint and maintain a centerline – thus, it is “significant.”
I’m sure that this doesn’t hold true in other parts of the world, but it seems to work really well for Oregon considering the practices of our DOT and the DOTs of the cities within.
Comment from Mele Sax-Barnett on 19 October 2012 at 18:53
And thanks Dion for the tutorial– I usually have a reference .osm dataset that I copy tags over from, but this is a great approach for cases when I don’t.