Could you please help me understand your suggestion? Why do you think that provincial roads should not be in the same category as national highways? Is this a practical thing? Based on road characteristics? Based on legal distinction?
I did provide an example of how such a distinction is useful - roads of different importance on an island, yet first one is not important as the other - and I am sure I could find many more in Cyclades. Can you please explain to me why this distinction won’t be useful on OSM (or provide an alternative example, or anything). Don’t get me wrong: I am not even arguing here. In all honesty, I am trying to make sense of your proposal so I can clearly understand it.
Do you mean roads that are not classified as either national or provincional?
Hm… seems to be complicated. Let me explain why:
It will surely be hard to define a road based on another feature (city, town, village) that is not clearly defined. If you define cities, towns and villages by population it might be hard to decide based on permanent (μόνιμος) versus actual (πραγματικός) population. If you also use any population for defining cities, towns and villages, you really need to take on account the distinction which is made by ΕΛΣΤΑΤ - the people who actually do the counting: Έννοιες και ορισμοί
If you forget about it’s population, then you can define a city, town or village by other definitions which could easily be found in many popular Greek dictionaries and encyclopaedias (it seems that even on the discussions in wikipedia, people have spent a lot of time trying to establish how these are defined).
For example, the settlement of Mykonos (not the whole island) has a population of 6.467. Is this a village, a city or a town? Based on the most popular English translation it’s a town. Based on ΕΛΣΤΑΤ it’s a city.
But to make things even more complicated, I am sure that you are aware that almost every island in Cyclades has a “Chora”. Chora is by many different definitions a town (e.g… a town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city). It’s the hub of an island and most commercial activity and services are based on this settlement (e.g. city/town hall, police station, fire station, shops etc). There are Choras which have a population of less than 2.000 citizens.
And finally, if for some reason you define a Town as a settlement of more than 1.999, less than 10.000, then how exactly can you map the road connecting Paroikia (4.522) with Naousa (2.316) at Paros Island? Secondary as per your suggestion for “roads that escaped from this whole network” or tertiary, as your suggestion for provincial roads (ΕΠ2 Παροικιά - Χριστός - Νάουσα according to ΦΕΚ 47Α/1956)?
It now even makes more sense to me to have provincial roads as secondaries instead of tertiaries.
We might even consider a third alternative proposal:
highway=secondary: Provincial Network - regardless of its classification as primary or secondary provincial network
(and to make sure that we cover relevancy, in case they are not important anymore - e.g. roads leading to nowhere or unpaved - they could of course being downgraded partially to something less important - importance was and still is the keyword in this discussion).
Well, I honestly have nothing else to add on this issue. I really hope that we (as a community) reach a consensus on something. I strongly believe that you (and I do mean all of you) are more experienced than me on things like that, so I would much prefer to have you all mapping things in agreement instead of discussing them :).