Israel August 2012

The Israeli Openstreetmap community is happy to announce that we have successfully changed the whole street classification in Israel. Some months we realized that the current classification inside of Israel is giving too much space for interpretation. Our rules we defined in the beginning of Openstreetmap in Israel where simply not covering everything. The idea was good, but we had more and more discussions on the right classification.

We had to deal with several problems:

1. We had no rule when a highway is a motorway and when its not. It was based on the personal feeling of the person if this got defined this or that way. This got even more complicated as no trunk definitions where used in Israel. In Israel a motorway can have 1 , 2 or even 3 digits.

2. All 4 digit roads in Israel where defined a tertiary roads and where not highlighted enough.

3. It was against the rule to define very big urban roads as secondary as it was reserved for 3 digit roads. But sometimes this was important for a good routing through the city.

As a result of a long discussion in the OSM Board (http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=17256) and a lot of research we agreed on the following new rule that was successfully adapted in the last two weeks:

Primary the road definition in Israel is not based anymore on the amount of digits but on the sign and color of the sign. Every street number (ref) is written on a sign that has a color.

• Blue is motorway (normally 1 to 3 digits)
• Red is trunk (normally 1 to 2 digits)
• Green is Primary (normally 3 digits)
• Secondary is brown (normally 4 digits)

Because we would like to highlight big and fast urban street it is now also allowed to define those roads as secondary even if doesn’t have a digit. Check it out: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=32.07&lon=34.879&zoom=9&layers=M