OpenStreetMap
Following complaints from local map users about an arificial demotion of a main road I spent 7 hours adding features to premote the rendering of the part-time bus gate in the middle of the road with the lorry turning circles, cctv enforcement camera plus the enforcement zone relation need now and barrier gate tag with timings and used are:highway to clearly show several islands and two one-way cycle lanes area:highway and routing lined sidewalks and lots of extra route lines needed around the traffic island and and the turning circle….
Withen hours it was demoted again. So now I can’t use the map for my client today as I hoped all of my efforts would allow.
Someone had mentioned in there reson a note about a list but as no place for where it was I worte this on its changeset and am repeating here:-
Regarding the A420 as it passes through the centre of Oxford.
{{{{{ Where is the list?
I’ve received complaints about this road being misrepresented. Ordence Survey and Goverment Departments local and National treat this as a major road. It has been rebuilt twice this mellenium because it has become worn out with traffic use. It has so many vehicals that it can still have a traffic queue stretching from Longwall to Turl Street in the rush hour when the through traffic restictions are still in place. Its the main 24hr spine route for two of the lorry access zones. Its wide enough to take five lanes of traffic and two more are dedicated to masses of local student tourist pedestians. It collects all the bus routes from the west side of the city to run down it and around and down St. Aldate’s. As the Buses act as the Citys mass transit system and the majority of people working and living in the city avoid driving to the City Centre as it is officialy discoraged through inflated parking charges and a rejection of additional private parking provisons such as adding an underground car park to a college building when its not been already…
In what sort of way is it not a major primary road???
I can understand that a simple representaion of a way running like there is no time restrictions on minority users like cars, but I have spent 7 hours drawing features to highlight and premote the rendering of the traffic gate the runs for only about 10 meters about the width of the carrageway there. Unlike in the past when it was a single line of one colour I left it delibratly as a tertiary middle (when it should be the same as the rest) to delibratly force renders to make it look different to map readers. So on this basis the Note tags should be and had had a bit more time would have been removed for being out of date. I stopped short of using area:highway tags to show the area of a central reservation runnig from the gate to just beyond Queens Lane. For the reasons noted on the notes entered into OSM at that place.
I had warned these routes were likly to be reupgraded when I got the Ref’s reentered on these roads last time they went as they are used in some signs and directions espcially for lorry drivers whose delivery diagrams include them.
So where do I have to take the argument to it mentions a list but not where to find it.. }}}}}}
I minded to remove the note and change the routes back to primary to hope the they may be rerendered in time for me to copy them for my client.
The road would not work without the restictions on through traffic as it would overload like other streets currently do at rush hour. Barriers on roads should be well rendered if used for road navigation to avoid this problem and a primary with dead ends isn’t unusal as they occur oftern at coasts, land borders and road numbers fragment too like the A34 which after 1930’s clasifing extension went from Manchester’s City Centre to the middle of Winchester (in Hampshire) today you can travel from the M3 to the M40 by Newbury on one part there are part in and just around Birmingham and other isolated stretches running near stoke and into the middle of Manchester from the south.
ok enough of being annoyed.
I hope this infomation is useful to people.
Discussion
Comment from EdLoach on 11 June 2015 at 16:20
My guess is the relevant list is this one with discussion about central road classifications in April 2011 if you want to browse the archives.
Comment from Govanus on 11 June 2015 at 18:09
thanks for the link. Haveing read it I think they haven’t given a substantial rebuful to the above it what I could read there. It seems that just becuse a few buses cycles and pedestrians use it some how dosn’t count to be rated highly. The vey high volume of remaining traffic as mentioned above and the factthat the councils are looking to build a tunnel to take just the buses alone shows that it isn’t a good enough reason to demote the route.
Comment from Socks on 11 June 2015 at 23:18
Please try to see that this comes across as very arrogant. It is not just about you and your client, there are many people using the data for all sorts of things and your edits will break some of them. The note asked you to discuss the change you wish to make with the OSM community but you went ahead anyway because it suited you. That the note was put on these highway ways should suggest that this is something that requires wider discussion, rather than being a simple case where there is one simple solution that was just waiting for someone to come along and implement it.
Picking up on a few of your points: nothing about the restrictions/etc on The High/St Aldates has changed since the note= tags were added. The note is not “out of date” unless changes are made, or the OSM community opinion changes, both of which could happen, but there is no evidence either has. Removing the note would be just as contentious as making the change to the highway= tags themselves.
The reason the note mentions “the mailing list” is because in 2007 (not 2011 as EdLoach suggested) when the community agreed this, that would be understood to have meant the main OSM-talk list where the conversation originally took place. The note needs to be updated, and I will do that shortly - I suggest talk-gb is the right forum for discussion before making further changes now.
These roads were originally changed because of map users’ complaints that a zoomed-out view of the area suggested that passing through Oxford City Centre was sensible way of travelling from points East of the city to destinations on the West and vice-versa. Just having a complaint off-list in the other direction is not grounds in-and-of-itself for changing the status-quo.
Finally, for now, you claim that The High carries traffic significant enough to be classified as a Primary Route. The Council traffic counts suggest that at 7,900 motor vehicles per day, this section is somewhat less busy than nearby Cowley Road (highway=secondary) and that nearby primary routes such as London Road have 2.5 times the traffic volume. There may be some argument that the St Aldates/High route could be classified as a secondary route, but again, this needs to be agreed with those currently part of the OSM community before any change is made.
Once again, let me repeat, there is not a high volume of traffic on High Street when compared to nearby Primary or Secondary routes.
If you do want to take this further, please start a conversation on the talk-gb list ( https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ) before making any further changes.
With best wishes!
Stephen
Comment from Warin61 on 12 June 2015 at 00:52
The words “on the list” may be obvious to the person who entered them … but lack clarity. I too probably fall into the same trap.
Perhaps this could have been better approached from both sides by personal contact using the OSM contact … www.openstreetmap.org/user/[user_name]? (Note that for some [user_name] should be in lower case only.) You can use the history of a node/way to find out the user_name of the last person who changed it.
Road classifications? Well that needs to be consistent across a large area to be usefull, so maybe it should stay at the present classification? It needs to be appropriate to the connecting roads too. So for me, I’d normally add features, detail .. but not change the existing classification unless there has been a large change with the road width, number of lanes, .. not just the traffic level/congestion?
Comment from Govanus on 12 June 2015 at 20:48
Thinks for the messages coming in from so many paths that I’m largely out of sync and in lag to many… I don’t read my email as often as some may think so if I map before reading changeset comments might take 2 to 4 days to get noticed! they do get there in the end but they might be out of date by then.
ok so lets try and answer some the flurry of points and counterpoints before we need to erect another memorial to martyrs south of the covered market [this for those not familiar to Oxford under discussion relates to the two memorials marking where Catholics were burned and killed during the civil-war in Christendom some centuries ago].
first I have been walking though these roads for a long time and all through the recent edit phase,(add have been out surveying again today) and have a good feel of the weight of traffic by length as well as number for most parts of the day and night (I usually walk though the site anytime upto about 1-3am in the morning as well as throughout the day and evenings). So unlike other areas I might map more lightly for less in depth info this is a spot I do no and from today have the ref’s for every sign in the middle of the road and a proportion of the lamps and signals too, plus I could map fairly easily every manhole cover etc…
So why did I change it from tertiary to Primary? Well several factors coalesced to get it done the week. One I had previously challenged the removal of Ref tags on these roads. As I had seen them in use and felt that that removal had been judgemental and incorrect kind of how people felt about me bumping up the priority of the High street. Incidentally it was the out of date ref:note tag that I referred to as out of date. As it clearly was - stating that the refs where not present when they now were again.
Two the reasoning given in the note didn’t really reflect what I saw on the ground which was a busy road dispite the restriction that people try to use when it was justified.
I looked a lot at that confusion issue some have been mentioning about it being a through route and then not and I specificly added the first basic bus_gate barrier tags to help resolve the problem. ..but they didn’t make it to many renderings and so people still became confused. thats when I invested 7 hours to mark the barrier in the area:highway system [that’s been in the wiki-tagging “manual” in different forms for near 4 years at least.
I had a lot of need for these when mapping the relations between narrow footways and wide roads and before sidewalks became known to me as separatable as I need to make so meny fictious ways to join stuff up even if the side walk made them less than a meter apart the centre of the road could be 5 or 10meters in places so the result was just horrible to look at and dificult to relate to the real landscape at the end. I did my homework on the wiki and tried adopt the tagging being asposed for us to use for this purpose. ..but again not everyone was reading from the same “hymn-sheet” and the discord was driving me nuts with people chngeing my contributions into tag sets that broke renders and routers alike. eventually I looked up what were the latest wiki options and posed it as a question on this diary system http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Govanus/diary/24021 and then, upon advice from an reader of the entry, to the help questions system https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/38079/latest-fashions-in-area-highways-and-the-plan-for-wash-common-coming-soon (it does vary between the two versions a bit as I tried to refine it etc). Which promptly failed to get any answers because it was closed prematurly for being a copy and paste of the diary entry. So so much for community help and consensus. So I pick a wiki type and blunderbust it into areas for others tidy or squabble over.
So thirdly with having thought the confusion problem was solved. I looked at the anomaly of such a highly prioritised road that apparently wasn’t because you couldn’t drive a car through it all day. So I began importing the latest version of the Millennial Transport strategy - lorry part that should how planners wanted lorry and other access 24 hours a day. The road is used as a branching spine for lorry routes approching from opersite side of the barrier. (this process is not yet compleated for the whole city yet but about half might be complete (not such if it needs new tags etc..))
Fourthly all those previously stated reasons came into my head. Now I understand that by vehicles alone it might look less but what if those figures are weighted statistically by size, weight, road-wear, number of occupants in each vehicle and traffic jams of 12-9 buses with some vans thrown in is a bit more substantial than 12-9 cars in a row. Incidentally when I came into the library to write all this and do other stuff I clocked that that the traffic on Longwall backs up from the southern lights by the high street as far back as the Marston Cycleway at the corner by the parks….
So I wasn’t impressed that it had been still redemoted for being “confusing” and an anomaly. There’s less traffic at the top end of the A4158 (Iffley Road) especially after the junction with the B4495. I also don’t believe that so much traffic from the A420 goes straight down the A4158 for instance - a Good chunk finds its way onto the A4165 and the A4144.
Really if its such a massive contention why net let the highways authority sort it out - and yes they picked to make and keep it as a primary now if British B-roads (originally 25% non-local traffic) are tertiary so that the Supped Expressways like the E05/A34 are primary and the other minorised A roads (original 50% or more nationally funded for a lot of non-local traffic) then make some secondary but I loby for the B480 to go to a secondary A-road then. The B480 has so much built around it since the 1930’s began. but then it local to non-local traffic not busyness that determined that after all there B road dual carriageways about the land and on the side of southpark in Oxford there is the remains of a white unclassified dual-carriageway Warnford Lane(to many students park in it to work properly now).
So when local people find the tertiary setting an anomaly and very confusing to use the because of it. I might just crack under the evidence and start taking action.
I’m happy to debate it, but I would like to remind renderers that make road maps that they should add barriered streets for the benefit of there users as this is how the whole Transport control system is designed to work around in Oxford at least. The adage is you can drive virtually anywhere but just not through anywhere.
The other big point I reserlution on is an agreead area mapping standard that we all agree on implement or doge and so things and just be mapped in peace and the OSM mapping system improved.
Comment from Socks on 13 June 2015 at 13:36
Thanks!
I, and other local mappers, disagree with your reasoning just as you disagree with ours (regarding the highway= status. I fully support the retention of the ref= tag, by the way). If you want to make this change to highway=primary, then you need to establish substantial support for it from the OSM community - once again, I suggest the the talk-gb mailing list is probably the best place to do this. If you prefer, there are other lists too (the international “tagging” or “osm-talk” lists might do, for example) and other methods (such as directly approaching people who’ve edited locally using the messaging system and getting them to make a public statement in support here). I still think you have the best chance on the talk-gb list (even though I don’t support your view, I am happy to make this suggestion and do so in good faith). If you make a good case and have good support from the community, then you will be free to make this change without it being quickly reverted. Ultimately if you think that I and others are acting unfairly, or without the support of the community, then you can ask the Data Working Group for a ruling. The DWG’s contact address can be found on http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group
In the meantime, I think it would be uncontentious to add designation=primary tags to these highways which would, at least, make it easier for you to produce a render that suits your needs and those of your clients. The designation= key was established since the original conversations about The High and St Aldate’s, but I think it suits this situation well.
Comment from Wynndale on 13 June 2015 at 16:54
The mailing list it was discussed on previously was a small and low-volume list. It may well have few enough subscribers to risk being an echo chamber. I notice that the English-language Wikipedia lists “Please clear this with WikiProject X first” as an example of the uncollaborative editing that community frowns on.
Reading through mailing list discussions I notice that some of the participants were talking about asking the county council to declassify the road. If the removal of the number is indeed co-opting OSM as part of such a campaign it would set an unwise precedent.
While OSM in many countries has decided that road numbers are perverse as a proxy for importance, we still need to make sure that the highway tag isn’t part of a declassification campaign either.
Comment from Govanus on 15 June 2015 at 16:56
I’m not arogant just after spending overtime on the issue a little bit driven or determined ;) I think the grammer reflected the weriness.
Convince me and I’ll be convinced :)
Having read anything pertaining by subject header from 2007 about A-roads and checked the same on the local Cotswolds section that didn’t begin before 2009 by focusing on the last year and this. I seems that it was actually agreed that all A roads would either be green Trunks or red primaries with all B-roads coming as Secondaries. Only two people in the cotsowld group seemed to show concern for the high street reming tertairy or below. The only other option I could deduce was that in Dec 2007 when you met in the Jerrico Arms pub you may have discussed it and then not put any minites up on the list…
You also seem to have difficulty keeping the opion that it should remain so lowly rated that you felt that the council would need to change it to meet your point of view.
So it looks like the community of officials and some of the locals are struggling to agree with your stated position. {thats just a judgement of what been presented to me to detmine a judgement on - in the sence of being pusuaded otherwise}.
As nobody wanted to take up the question of tagging of areas that if not messed up by others can work with older systems by making the new ares look distigusable. I think some thought that the logic of useing the same taging for points, ways, areas and relations would be the most logical - but its been shown that two meny things take ways and areas (both held in data the same way as ways cept some additional tagging or tag inferance of area like landuse, ment that wasn’t going to fly with roads like it was solved for rivers land use and buildings etc) messy but thats dealing with legacy for you.
I do agree that boycotting for the demotion of a major road just because it works in two halves during the day is a bit too political.
I’ve to leave for closeing now but I’ll look some more in a few sdays at your grooups .