Tel Aviv's Begin Road Classification

Begin Road (דרך בגין, Route 2) has been recently changed from Primary to Trunk. Is this new classification correct?

I’m pretty sure a road in a residential area with a residential speed limit and buildings + sidewalks shouldn’t be classified as Trunk.

The offending chanset ID is 51232116

This is in line with the Israeli guidelines because this road is part of “Road 2”.

Generally in OSM, road classification is about importance, not speed or surface. It allows OSM maps to show the important roads at low zoom levels. The wiki page the highway tag says:

I still think marking it as Primary inside of Tel Aviv makes more sense. It should be Trunk outside of Tel Aviv, but Primary inside of Tel Aviv.

Perhaps the guidelines need to be changed - I don’t think Namir road / Begin road / Hamasger Street have the same national network importance as, say, Route 4.

Similarly, Route 25 is Trunk outside of Be’er Sheva, but Primary when inside the city. I think that makes a lot more sense, and should be applied for Tel Aviv as well.

Primary makes sense to me; that would put it on par with Jabotinsky and Bar Lev (Lod Rd), and would still be one rank higher than most other major streets (e.g., Ibn Gvirol).

Should the same demotion be done for the portion of Route 40 between 471 and Shlomo street? https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/239544919#map=15/32.0625/34.9041. That portion was last edited in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/51286946 (a few hours ago) which apparently re-classified it from primary to trunk.

I think this is a mapping error. It also creates a disconnect in Hwy 25 in lower zoom levels. http://israelhiking.osm.org.il/#!/9/31.1834/34.6783

The OSM community in Israel has decided and documented the guidelines in order to create consistency.

If anyone wants to change the guidelines, please open a separate discussion where you first present an alternative criteria explain the benefits and disadvantages of the proposal.

“makes sense to me” is not a criteria…

I think that a road of high importance on the national network that passes through the city, if it is a central street in the city (a separation line built, central places in the city), should be marked according to the WikiProject Israel.
It should be noted that main streets are characterized by the fact that they cross the city from side to side or at least continue along a significant section of the city - a characteristic that is evident in all the main roads that cross cities. (Except for exceptions).
If this is indeed the right way to map the roads, we must create such uniformity throughout the country.
By the way, look at other maps of Israel - the roads keep a constant mark for all their lengths in order to keep the mapping of the national road system properly.

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Israel (OSM Israel procedures): First rule for numbered roads: The category is determined by the color of the sign, not by the number of digits!

According to this rule, Highway 40 and Highway 2 will be mapped as Trunk Road along the entire length

See, for example, Google Maps: Route 2 - https://www.google.co.il/maps/@32.0980393,34.7999476,13z?hl=iw&hl=iw
Route 40 - https://www.google.co.il/maps/@32.0394157,34.9221705,12z?hl=iw&hl=iw

Here is an example of an old 1:250,000 map showing Road 25 crossing Beer Sheva.
In this map, all trunk roads are crossing all cities and towns without changing their road type.

I am not sure what I think any more. How do we classify Tel Aviv’s Rokach Avenue, the part of it that’s west of Shitrit? On the one hand, Rokach has no national road number; on the othre hand, it is as wide as Namir, has a higher speed limit than Namir, fewer stops, more speed cameras, and has an overpass that gives it the right of way over Namir. (The overpass at Namir/Rokach junction is east-west, not north-south.) Going by these criteria, one would expect Rokach to have a classification at least as high as Namir.

But currently Namir is trunk or primary, while Rokach is currently only highway=secondary?

Rokach is not an essential part of the nation-wide road network. It is an important, yet intra-city, road.
Width, speed, traffic lights, do not matter much.
For example, Highway 20 (Ayalon) has sections with 70 Km/H speed limit, but that does not make it any less important.

The importance of a specific road in the national road network can change when it gets into a city. For example, route 4 in Kiryat Bialik is obviously less important than route 23 which is just next to it.

There’s also the issue of map readability in higher zoom levels. too many roads that are marked wide & with similar colors too close to eachother makes the map less readable.

And as I’ve said, there’s no way Hamsger Street is as important to the national road network as the main part of route 4. imo, route 2 south of Rokach should be Primary.

You keep mentioning these criteria in the wiki, but they’re for inter-city roads. They don’t talk about city streets. Clearly a different criteria should be made for city streets. You say “determined by the color of the sign”, but inside of Tel Aviv route 2 has no sign color.

Before these recent changes, the classification made sense, and didn’t cause any problems. I don’t think that there was a reason to change it.

I also don’t understand why we need a new thread to discuss these rules, seeing as a discussion has already started in this thread.

The criteria are for numbered roads in Israel. You seem to choose to ignore the fact that such roads enter and/or cross cities and towns.

In any case, I didn’t see any proposed alternative classification criteria in or out of cities.

I imagine the alternative criteria would be to take the route shield’s color as a hint to the road’s importance, but not as a final arbiter. If a road is more, or less, important than its route shield color suggests, then it would be tagged according to its importance, not according to its route shield color.