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.