Highway classification

So here is my suggestion for the new road classification in Openstreetmap for Israel:
(I have updated it with speed limits and exceptions)

PLEASE APPROVE OR GIVE FEEDBACK

###############################################################################

First rule for numbered roads: It doesn’t count the amount of digits but the color of the sign!

=> MOTORWAY (Blue sign)- all freeways - National roads and Inter-City roads.
Normaly they have one digit (example road 2) or two digits (example road 20).
As a exception they could have also three digits (example road 431).
Speed limit is 110 km/h if no sign defines something lower.
Mapnik color: █████

=> TRUNK (Red sign) - all expressways.
Expressways in Israel could look very much like a freeway.
Normaly they have two digits in the sign (example road 10).
Speed limit is 100 km/h if no sign defines something lower.
To avoid editing wars it always counts the color of the sign. If its blue it counts as freeway. If its red it counts as expressway.
Mapnik color: █████

=> PRIMARY (Green sign) - all regional roads.
Normaly they have three digits in the sign (example road 412).
Speed limit is 90 km/h if no sign defines something lower.
Mapnik color: █████

=> SECONDARY (Brown/ Black sign) - all regional roads.
Normaly they have four digits in the sign (example road 4111).
Priority over other crossing roads (the other roads have a stop sign)
Speed limit is 80 km/h if no sign defines something lower.
Mapnik color: █████

[Exception per Eric22 request]: very large urban roads that are unnumbered (generally around 1 per 100000 inhabitants). Roads that are more important for routing connections that a normal tertirary road.
Here is one example of such a exception in Hadera: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?way=24873711

TERTIARY - all importand (connection-) roads (no colored sign) .
Priority over other crossing roads (the other roads have a stop sign)
Speed limit is 80 km/h if no sign defines something lower.
Mapnik color: █████

I completely agree with MrIsrael, let’s define all from sign colors, and not from other properties.
If we’ll meet any really problematic case - we’ll just discuss it here.

There is one remaining thing I’m not happy about with this suggestion.

There are a number of urban roads that are very large (sometimes 3 lanes in each direction). According to a strict sign color division, these would all be tertiary. According to my suggestion which was adopted by Mr_Israel, these would be secondary.

On the other hand, there are many non-urban numbered roads, even with red signs, that are only 1 lane in each direction. Often they don’t even have traffic lights when they meet other. So these roads would be classified as “trunk”, while the much larger urban roads would be classified as “secondary” or lower? This just doesn’t seem right to me.

That’s why I’d prefer for the sign colors to refer to one level lower - red sign=primary not red sign=trunk, and so on. This decreases the mismatch between the road levels. What then should we do with the trunk level? Earlier I suggested roads with “some interchanges” being called trunk, but I would also be fine with not using trunk at all. Who says we have to use every level?

eric22, your proposal reminds me “mapping for renderer”. You propose to map for navigators.
Why to not get navigator software to check max_speed, lanes and traffic light tags and assume which between two roads is better?

Also, we have very nice tag http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Practical_maxspeed where you may tag actual state of things on specific road, and propose to osmand developers to use this tags.

Eric, why is the width or a existing traffic light of a road so important to show on the map?
Isn’t it more important to highlight important roads on the map and let the user or software choose which road to take.

I agree that we would have streets for example road 4 in the Negev where you can drive up to 90km/h on a small road with only one line per direction that are not even separated.
This would get the trunk classification. And your 3 lines in each direction urban road that allows only 50- 60 km/h would get “only” a secondary.

For Israel the road 4 has a lot higher importance than this urban road.
The connection between cities is something you would like to see right away on the map and the urban roads are less important even if they are bigger in size in real.

By using the new classification you can highlight roads like in Hadera that connecting important roads and should be preferred to other small roads by using secondary definition.
This will give us more freedom and a good and strict rule everybody can follow. Currently you can not see 4 digits roads highlighted at all on several zoom levels.

I don’t look on the trunk definition like it must be used at all.
I simply realized that we are using motorway for motorway, primary for 2 digits roads, secondary for 3 digits road and 4 digits roads TERTIARY.
There is simply missing one step to distinguish between a main city road and a road that received a 4 digits numbers.
Several 4 digits street are generally linking smaller towns and villages. Those streets should be preferred over normal TERTIARY ways, thats why they received a number.

Look at this trunk definition that shows that trunk definition is mainly coming from UK and has a specific sign: From http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway
=> Important roads that aren’t motorways. Typically maintained by central, not local government. Need not necessarily be a divided highway. In the UK, all green signed A roads are, in OSM, classed as ‘trunk’.

So for the UK there is a green sign (thats why its green in Mapnik) that declares the street to be a trunk road.

In Ireland has the same kind of definition that is based on a letter and number:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ireland/Roads => National Primary Routes (N1-N40), regardless of build quality.

Summary we would not be the only country that uses trunk for non motorway like roads.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtrunk

But I agree that the current Mapnik rendering is not Israel friendly.
In Israel we would need to paint the roads in different colors:

The green trunk would need to be red.
The red primary road would need to be green.
The orange secondary would need to be brown.

I realized today that a lot of street definitions has been changed in the last week.

Some of the definition is based on our new suggested rules and some others are simply wrong and doesn’t make sense.
As he went through several countries and “fixed” things I would like to reverse all his changes in Israel.
Here is a example changeset: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12605653

I have wrote him a email and asked him to stop it and refereed him to this thread.

Can anybody reverse his changes?

Beside that it would be really great to finish the discussion on this thread and get to a consents.
We have this thread open for over a month already.

I see this man done more than one changeset in Israel area. He not only changed road types, but also deleted some nodes and roads.
I’ll try to undo his changes in our area at evening.

I opened a new topic http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=262616#p262616, let’s discuss there all our reverts.

Sorry for not replying earlier,

I completely agree with Mr_Israel’s proposal.

dimka

I have found a problematic road that needs to be checked for a rule:
שדרות התעופה HaTeufa http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=31.9962041&lon=34.8716987&zoom=16&layers=M

This airport freeway like road has no ref ID at all. So I also expect it not to be a blue sign.
All other map providers do not show this road as freeway. For them its only SECONDARY or lower.

I am still not sure I like every detail of Mr_Israel’s proposal. But in any case I am outvoted. So I now declare my support for the proposal

I’ll check at evening if this road have any signs

I have updated the wiki pages of Israel to the new accepted standard.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Israel#Conventions

So the next step would be to start migrating the roads to the new standard.
Can somebody automate this?

1. primary=>trunk
2. primary_link=>trunk_link
3. secondary=>primary
4. secondary_link => primary_link
5. Then we will manually search for all primary roads that have no ref and check what status this road should get.

I’m currently running through my own list making sure that all primary roads are having a ref key.
I have already completed this job on motorways. ALL motorways in Israel have a “ref” key.

How can this may be done automatically? the assumption was to change road types accordingly to the road ref sign colors. Or I’m wrong?

correct.

Todays primary (red sign) and secondary (green sign) road classification is fully the same as in the future standard.
The only difference is that we move them one class higher.
From primary => trunk. From secondary => primary.
This is the only thing we can somehow automate.

There will be no automate to find the 4 digits roads and define them as secondary.
There will also be no automate to find the differences between a highway (blue sign) and a trunk (red sign).

We have currently around 1.000 primary road parts (bridge and roundabout included).
And around 1.100 secondary road parts (bridge and roundabout included).
I hope you don’t want to go through all of them and change them manually?

ah, ok, I understand.
but making automated changes may be little problematic, as any bbox will contain also our neighbours.
I can create query which will return all highways by type. Possible, I can try to use smaller bbox’es, such as only roads near borders will be unchanged.

Any other ideas?

Would be interesting how you are importing it back to OSM.
I just learned how to fetch data and filter it from OSM. No clue how to write back.

It’s easier than you think
Just export to osm file, open it in josm, check/edit/validate and upload using same josm.

Before we start our bulk change, we must be sure nobody do such changes manually.
I think on near weekend I can handle this.

Ohh… I just wanted to do that but the first step is already finished as it looks.
Seems like all primary roads are now trunk. From zoom level 13 all major roads are green

Yesterday I made sure that all “old” primary roads are defined correctly and have a ref tag.

So I would wait for tomorrow for a new Geofabrik extract to check if really everything is changed and nothing was left.
And I would like to migrate all secondary to primary tomorrow. My first bulk change.

Fine