Route ชม. 3035

I was just beginning to add bridges and other details to the section of ชม. 3035 where the new dual carriageway section has recently opened and found that another mapper has changed the classification from tertiary to secondary.

This road meets our standard definition of tertiary highway because it uses the Thailand standard naming convention of a 4-digit number preceded by a two-character province prefix, in this case, ชม. Yet, it is a major thorofare carrying a lot of traffic. I’m not opposed to this upgraded classification but I don’t want to start an edit war by changing it back unilaterally.

So I’m asking this group how you feel about it either way.

Cheers,

Dave

Dave,

Not sure where the road is, but don’t even skip a heartbeat over this … its no more Mr Nice Guy now … if you don’t recognise the mapper as “one of us”, well they changed it without consulting anyone, change it back to match the Wiki guide.
I found I was doing this a lot last year, (mainly Phitsanulok & Chiang Rai) but seems to have eased back this year.

To add to this, I believe roads should be consistent in status throughout their length even if means 4 lanes get the same status as where it changes to 1 or 2. There will be the odd exception I know, in some mappers reasoning, but in principle, I believe the road classification determines the status, rather than the physical attributes. Is a far easier system to police.

Best, Russ.

Hi Russ,

You know the road. Sorry I wasn’t more descriptive in my opening statement. It’s the extension of the canal road south to meet the108 south of Hang Dong. It nicely avoids those single lane sections of the 108 going towards Hot and I’ve been happily using it since it opened a few years ago. They recently added a second lane across the canal, removed a bunch of small bridges and added a few fancy new ones. It also has a name now. Officially it’s the San Patong Hang Dong Bypass Road.

Why are you talking in riddles?
I guess you speak of the ways:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/253468609/history
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/55465599/history

As I can see from the history, the former was tagged as a secondary by Tom Layo already 4 years ago; changed by Russ to tertiary, and one month ago changed back to secondary by a different user.
The latter started as a secondary_link by Stephan, changed by Russ to tertiary, then to primary road 121 by Stephan.
Such a history shows that the road is not easy to be classified correctly.

If the road is “major road inside that province” - and looking at the map and its tagging history, it seems to be so, then our criteria for a secondary road as defined in the Wiki are met.
See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Thailand : road numbers are just one hint for classification, the importance of the road is the best criterion.

How important is that road between its junctions to roads 121 and 116? Similar to 108 or much less important?

I haven’t been there, so people knowing the situation on the ground may have better information than I do.

I did not mean to speak in riddles. I know its history and am very familiar with the highway personally and as I said, the highway is heavily used and is now a major new dual carriageway. It wasn’t built to connect towns but rather to bypass them. I noticed bridges with the name San Patong Hang Dong Bypass Road. There are other tertiary highways that have similar use patterns I’m sure. I use the bypass every time I head south from Chiang Mai because it avoids the one-lane sections of 108 where it passes through several towns.

Tagging it one way or the other is controversial, I agree, and that’s why I posted this. It should be obvious I’m looking for opinions, not deciding what to do based on my own feelings or what the rule book says.

Seems to me its a bit of a cluster-f*** down that way, with 3 unclassified roads that touch the new northbound bypass, without actually connecting, a section on the southbound that should be one way but carries no tag, and in one spot, secondary on the southbound, tertiary on the North.
I’m riding along it today, and will see whats actually on the ground, but the Wiki is clear to me on the status, and if you don’t change it Dave, I will.

I did notice a few unclassifieds that were never connected to the new way. I got those when I added the new U-turn bridges yesterday after my survey. I also removed the old bridges that are now either blocked or destroyed.

I must confess, I used a new technique to map those bridges. I used man_made=bridge with layer=1 but then as outlined in the Wiki did not tag the ways but only connected them to the bridge perimeter. You’ll see what I mean when you d/l the next map from Lambertus. Not sure I like it but the way those bridges are built seems to match the concept of man_made bridge as it’s described. But that’s another story.

On the retagging, I would say let’s wait a bit to see if any other Thailand mappers weigh in with an opinion.

Well, regarding prefixed DRR roads, นบ.3021, นบ.1020 and นบ.3030 in the Greater Bangkok area are tagged as primary, but they’re actually operated under a different bureau than the other นบ roads, so that’s a rather obvious criterion for exception. In any case, though, tagging schemes tend to break down in large urban areas, where a road’s importance tends to grow independently of its overseeing authority, and Chiang Mai is, though nowhere near Bangkok, also a large urban area. Maybe we could decide on such exceptions on a case-by-case basis? If so, it can be documented in the Wiki.

Take a look at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/48.99352/8.42070
Do you see the road named “Südtangente” with reference number “K9567”? In most parts of Germany, “K” stands for “Kreisstraße”, i.e. a county-road, tertiary (Bavaria uses a different system: there the reference number of tertiary starts with the code of the county, like Thailand).
But here, the road https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/364582537 is even a “trunk”, not a “tertiary”. And that’s not an error by a JOSM user typing “t” and then using the autocomplete option.

In my mind, to allow the status of a road to be decided by its “importance” is a recipe for disaster. It’s just so subjective, and will lead to edit wars in certain places.
Furthermore, it can also lead to the road changing status multiple times where where some sections are deemed more important than others, by individual users.
I vote strongly to keep our current system (& reinforcing the fact that status is related to classification) , but if we need a Wiki addendum listing the exceptions we have voted on, then so be it.