As Willi2006 said, scrutinising others’ edits isn’t relevant to the discussion, and probably fruitless. I never claimed to be an active or big contributor; I just thought I’d offer my suggestions for others to constructively comment on, seeing as over two years had elapsed since the subject was last touched upon and things of course would have changed. That, of course, requires contributors’ willingness to discuss and listen to others opinions’. As far as I remember, and re-reading the discussion page confirms that, the last time discussion took place, Willi2006 was the only person vehemently opposed to representing highways any other way than currently documented. However, only a couple other contributors had any input, and Stephankn wasn’t among them, nor others present on this forum whose opinion I thought would be valuable, though perhaps I was mistaken in the amount of traffic it receives.
Anyway, I thought that two years might have been enough time to give a better picture of the state of things, and that with constructive discussion we would be able to confirm whether everyone agrees with the status quo. Anyway, their shouldn’t be need to argue over editors’ suspected motives or agendas. The merit of the proposal at hand is what matters.
As asked above, take this as the proposal:
The current classification system is inadequate because it does not reflect the importance of a highway in the street grid as described in Key:highway. Primary is defined as “a major highway linking large towns”, which is what three-digit routes are, although they are currently tagged as secondary. Compare with the example from the DOH website: Route 202 links Chaiyaphum and Khemmarat, both major towns with 10,000+ population. Likewise, the description for secondary as “a highway which is not part of a major route, but nevertheless forming a link in the national route network” and “generally linking smaller towns and villages” fits the four-digit routes, which are defined by the DOH as national highways linking provincial centres with its districts or important places within those provinces.
The current system also doesn’t allow a systematic classification for rural and local highways; they are forced to assume the same classification level already used by the national highway system.
Shifting the currently applied classifications up one level would address these issues. One- and two-digit routes can share the classification of trunk, since they are the major routes and practically serve the same level of traffic. The DOH also defines both of them as principal highways (ทางหลวงแผ่นดินสายประธาน), differing in whether or not they cross regions.
So here’s the proposal:
Highways beginning with 5-9 (as well as expressways) = motorway, as before.
1- & 2-digit = trunk
3-digit = primary
4-digit = secondary
Rural & local highways = tertiary
Unnumbered roads = unclassified
Far from ignoring the DOH classification scheme, this should provide room for a better degree of scheme adherence and differentiation between highway levels (except one- and two-digits, that is). The change is systematic, so it should be possible to universally convert highways which already adhere to the current system without needing to manually examine individual routes. This was among the alternative proposals shot down two years ago, and I would like to know what others think of it now. I also hope the more knowledgeable contributors would share the technical aspects of how feasible the proposal is.
If it is agreed that the current system works better, it would be great to finally have that properly documented and written down. Otherwise, constructive discussion resulting in a better classification scheme should lead to overall improvement of the project. I doubt a few minutes from each editor would subtract much from overall time contributed to mapping. After all, the world isn’t ending tomorrow (as far as we know).
Also wondering whether discussion is supposed to continue here or move to the discussion page; there is a comment there saying discussion should be held in the forums.
By the way, in case you were still wondering, most of my edits consisted of fine-tuning details of already-mapped areas (almost all in Bangkok actually), e.g. marking dual carriageways, flyovers (overpasses) and names. They are minor and relatively small in amount; it is fortunate for the project that others can afford more time and effort to contribute. Feel free call mine armchair edits; I won’t take offence, thank you.