Road Classification System (talk & poll)

Hi,

I should clarify my position here before we go in circles: I am getting concerned that you are focusing too literally on the layout and condition, but the fact is that all provincial roads should be secondary for sake of simplicity. If you are worried about the layout and condition then we should use the lanes, smoothness and surface tags.

However, there are special exceptions that I do not have control over, such as cars being banned in Hydra Island, and that section of Attica Provincial Road 14 through a military base between Perama and Skaramagas: if cars are banned for these exceptional cases, then there we have a exceptional reason not to tag them as secondary.

i think we should re-consider the use of highway=trunk, now that most of the primary national network has been upgraded into motorways.

the term trunk road in Greece is rather vague and no legally binding, this poses a problem…or an opportunity to better represent greek roads…

last time we decided trunk roads to be those belonging in the primary national network (that is becoming largely obsolete because of the motorways), i think we should include more

important roads like Thermopyles - Antirrio, Larisa - Trikala should become trunk, serving as link roads to motorways
multi-lane major avenues like Syggrou/Kifisias etc
roads that are being upgraded into motorways like Northern Cretan Corridor (BOAK)

Hi,

As Amaroussi, I suggested that trunk should go to major National Roads. Right now, I am thinking that it should include sections of the Secondary National Network that are part of E-Roads (otherwise, they and perhaps the Tertiary National Network could be primary).

I need more time to think of a new highway classification table.

UPDATE: Here it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ika-chan!#May_2017_changes

well i tried my idea and the trunk roads included are:
EO51 E 85 Ardanio - Ormenio
EO1β Chalastra - Thessaloniki
EO2 E 79 A2/A24 junction - Thessaloniki (widened section of Langada street)
EO2 E 86 Florina - Thessaloniki
EO3 E 65 Larisa - Kozani & Ptolemaida - Florina
EO5 (sections where A5 is not completed)
EO6 E 92 Larisa - Trikala
EO6 E 92 Trikala - Panagia (will be demoted to primary after A3 is complete)
EO8 Athina - Eleysina
EO9 E 55 Patra - Pyrgos
EO20 Ioannina - Kalpaki
EO22 Kalpaki - Kakavia
EO27/EO48 Thermopyles - Itea - Antirrio
EO90 (sections not upgraded to motorway)
EO91 Leoforos Syggrou/Poseidonos
EO83 Kifisias/Thiseos etc
EO111 Thessaloniki internal ring road (not officially defined as motorway)
possible candidates:
Larisa - Karditsa
Lamia - Karditsa - Trikala (until A3 is complete)
Vari - Koropi
Igoumenitsa - Preveza - A52

also other major urban highways like Vouliagmenis, Mesogeion, Vasilisis Sofias/Amalias etc

so i think we are very close

trunk roads generally are defined as important/strategic roads, inferior to motorways

in our case most of them are included in e-roads routes, but i have some objections:
E 55 - section Pyrgos - Kyparissia could be trunk, Kyparissia - Gargalianoi - Pylos - Kalamata NOT
E 65 - section Lamia - Mpralos, Kastelli - Kissamos NOT, there is also a section that runs through Kalamata that cant be trunk
E 86 - section Krystallopigi - Florina has very low traffic, most people choose A29, its a MAYBE
E 92 - section Larisa - Volos also has the same issue, because of A1
E 951 - this route should only include section Amfilochia - Ioannina of A5 (when is complete)
E 952 - the whole route is not that important to be trunk
E 961 - section Sparti - Gytheio the same

there is also no need to move other classes around, the rest stays as it is:
motorway - motorway
trunk - important national highways/major urban avenues
primary - rest of secondary national network/important urban roads
secondary - tertiary national network/provincial roads/secondary urban roads
tertiary - roads connecting superior roads, villages/residential streets with priority

Give me some time to think this through. I have not yet given the final go-ahead, but did you ask nikospag, greecemapper and aitolos before going ahead at such a wide-impacting scale?

Hi,

I have good reason to believe that the 1998 road list is not an authoritative list of National Roads.

The registry states clearly that the numbers other than those on the 1963 Decree were added solely for publishing road accident reports, and not for general use.

Therefore, roads like the EO9γ do not actually exist, and the now-offline OKXE database proved it.

Source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=142660656&postcount=2803

well this document was the closest we had to a law, the only update since 1963…the truth is, it solved a lot of numbering problems…also dont forget EO8a was an actual highway…we can omit these numbers, retaining their status as national highways (branches)…some exceptions could be EO1a,EO8a,EO9a,EO16a

this sentence makes no sense to me:

what is the deal with okxe anyway? are we getting that back or is it gone for good?

With all due respect, I don’t work for ΥΠΕΚΑ-MEE (who replaced ΟΚΧΕ-HEMCO in 2013), so how would I know about the fate of the layers?

I have been talking with the guys at SkyscraperCity for some time and it is clear that it does not matter how close the 1998 registry is, I have been told that the numbers on the Registry do not stand officially. From page 9:

As it stands, the 1998 registry is not official, and thus is no longer appropriate for both OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia.

Source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=142682192&postcount=2805

According to Greek Code of Law, all documents signed by the Greek Government are official. Therefore all documents published by Hellenic Statistical Authority are fully legal and official, even if they mention that are for filling Road Accidents Forms.
These documents have been created to reference the new roads that had not been constructed (or did not exist) in the Ministerial Decree of 1963, and that makes sense to me (and others). I don’t know who that idiot is (ea1969) that posted in skyscrapercity (i am calling him idiot because he is calling us idiots) but he is talking nonsense. ← Edit: He is not calling us idiots, i misunderstood the meaning of his last sentence. Sorry for that.

Guys, official documents are our compass, if you start to question them then you will lose your (our) path, and all boundaries will be lost.

As for trunk roads:
In my point of view THERE ARE NO OFFICIALLY TRUNK ROADS IN GREECE as i have said many times before. BUT in OSM i think they can exist only if they connect Motorways, otherwise they will become orphaned (island) roads.

Edit: But we already have voted that Primary National Network should be trunk, and that is enough for me.

Edit:

I think JayCBR has a point here. But there is not an official definition of “important roads” or “major roads” (national roads) in legal documents. Who decides what roads are important?

That is my humble opinion.

I despair of making sense of this tangled mess; even the motorway authorities seem to become confused sometimes. I was returning from Veria the other day, and came across this sign, for the exit from A2 towards Alexandria. I knew well this was National Road 1, so I was more than surprised to find the sign marked “13” – as is the next sign, on the gantry 500 metres ahead, according to the link.

Ha ha ha ! that was funny. I am wondering where the hell did they find the number 13 !!!.
Nevertheless i will try to inform them about their mistake, thanks for sharing this.

Edit: Egnatia Odos has been notified. (including your Google photo).

I’ll wager a guess and say someone didn’t look well at the map and thought 13 continued through Katerini to Alexandria. It doesn’t make much more sense than the alternatives, but there you have it.

Thank you for your trouble. I wonder how long it will take them to fix the signs; I imagine they’ll just paste something on them, for the time being at least.

Probably.

That’s an excuse for amateurs and not for professional road constructors. Anyway i hope they will fix this soon and properly.

PS. We are off topic. Sorry for that guys.

Hi all, I’ve taken time off the road classification debate for personal reasons (instead I am adding missing roads from Bing/DigitalGlobe imagery), but I think that one of the reasons the debate appears to lose sense of direction is because we may be trying to compromise too much in terms of whether a road is this or that on the basis of the road condition.

I think that we should not be making enemies with “lanes=", "surface=” and “smoothness=*” when deciding on classification of the roads. By using these keys to describe the real condition of the roads, I feel that the development of the road classification policy for the mainland will be a lot simpler and a lot less heated.

I don’t think that we classify roads on the basis of the road condition, but on the basis of legal documents.

We use these tags, as our wiki mentions that. - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Greece/National_Road_Network#Ways.
But this doesn’t solve the classification problem in Greece (eg. what roads should be trunk roads).

Looking back, I think that the classification problem is the worst I have ever seen: however, I think I can support the idea all villages should be served by at least a tertiary road for navigational reasons. lanes=, surface= and smoothness=* should handle the real condition of the road.

In respect of JayCBR, my main concern at present is that the user does not leave changeset comments, which left me confused as to what kind of system the user was trying to implement. (Source: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/JayCBR/history))

I agree. Editing without comments is a bad practice and shows disrespect for other editors. Comments are very-very important.
As for the “all villages should be served by at least a tertiary road for navigational reasons”, i think this is already a fact for most, if not all, villages in Greece.

I want to add something about National Roads Registry of 1998.
Three days now i am digging through documents published on the Official Government Gazette and other documents from various Municipalities published on the web. I haven’t found, not even one, that mentions National Roads Registry of 1998 .

I guess that is because this document has not been published on the Official Government Gazette, and that makes it a low value document, even if it is a fully legal and official document. Therefore i strongly recommend that we must treat it accordingly, and keep it low in our list of sources for roads classification numbering, or not to keep it at all.

Stop Fighting Over Who Created The World And Fight Against The People Who Are Trying To Destroy It

ika chan we have talked about this so many times…i wont spend half an in hour in every changeset stating the obvious (every time i spend more than 10-15 minutes editing, i get the incorrect version error)

you dont have to jump in like a beep in every discussion and bring this up again and again, in a completely unrelated manner

we all know the official classification is a mess…we had 3 options:
a. leave the roads in their condition they were 2-3 years ago
b. ignore the official classification (like i wanted from day 1)
c. follow the official documents by letter (we voted for this and we tried so hard to implement it), i know the 1998 registry is not in any gazzette but it solves so many problems and contradictions

we could use nat_ref for those ambiguous numberings so nobody has a problem with them, but THEY ARE national highways, although not mentioned in the 1963 document

The last phrase in my previous post has been changed to:

I think its more clear now.

Those options were and they still are unacceptable, and you know that.

We will still follow the official documents by letter, except this one.
I know that it seems to solve many problems and contradictions (and it does), but there is a problem when the only official mapping organization in Greece (OKXE) is not using it, and as far as i know they will not use it at all in future updates. (and i think that an update is being “cooked” right now as we speak).
If OKXE is not accepting this document, it makes no sense to use it in OSM.
I agree with you that THEY ARE national highways, and they will remain that way, and that is ok with OKXE too (in most, if not all, cases i think). We will only remove the numbering (ref), and nothing else.

PS. As for the comments, i am wondering why no other user/editor has a problem to leave comments (worldwide). If you are the only one, then you must start wondering too. I think that comments make your life easier too when you are editing.

PS. Το επόμενο μήνυμα μου θα είναι στα Ελληνικά, όπως και σε κάθε forum του OSM που γράφουν στην γλώσσα τους. (εκτός ίσως από μερικά που έχουν το ίδιο κόμπλεξ με μας)