Delete E-road relations and int_ref

I would like to delete all the E-road (“Europavei”) relations in Norway. They are broken beyond repair and have not served any purpose for a number of years.

There is one E-road relation for each E-road, for example E6, E18 etc. All highway segments which are part of E6 are supposed to be members of the E6 relation, but there are big gaps, the order is chaotic etc. The relations causes highway editing to become a complex task, often leading to mistakes. I have given up fixing them a long time ago.

It is anyway very easy to extract all highways belonging to e.g. E6 through Overpass by using ref=“E 6”, so I do not understand why these relations are necessary.

Also, I would like to remove the redundant int_ref=* tag in Norway. This tag is used in some countries where the local ref=* is different from the E-road ref, but this is not the case in Norway, so int_ref is always the same as ref in this country (except that ref=“E 6” corresponds to int_ref=“E 06”, which is creating problems for some app’s).

Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

Hi NKA,
I appreciate what you want to achieve. It is important to lower thresholds for updating e.g highways.
I do wonder though, what the replies are to the followiong questions:

  • Is there a reason not to bring the question up for comments on the international tagging mailinglist or similar fora?
  • What do the OSM Wiki guidelines say? To me it almost seems obligatory to use current tagging, according to
    https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Europe/E-road_network
    https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:int_ref
  • How easy is it to re-establish the relations for E-roads in case good reasons for having them coome foward “after the fact”?
  • Could it be that there are “important” aplications that rely on there being relations or on using int_ref? Applications that will perhaps not be adjusted to accomodate the change done for Norway.

[Edited for clarity]

I see you have posted the question on the discussion page, which is good. However the discussion on the discussion pages might go by unnoticed?
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:WikiProject_Europe/E-road_network

I couldn’t agree more.
Don’t think I’ve tagged new roads on E routes with int_ref ever.

Route relations can be useful, but are easily broken by inexperienced users.

It doesn’t help that they insist on using leading 0 on the 1-9 route as well even though the signs do not.
And it creates double ref renders in some maps that use both and just makes it look cluttered.

I support this.

I think this is a question for the Norwegian community, not for someone who is never mapping in Norway. I have, however, asked for comments on the relevant wiki page.

The first link is just to the project wiki back when the E roads were established. The second link is describing a redundant tag in Norway because int_ref i identical to ref in this country, unlike many other countries were the E-road ref is often not known. There are also hundreds of other tags which we are not using.

I think nobody would like to re-establish these relations. They are a big mess and not currently useful. But it would be possible to start from scratch, just copy all segments into a relation.

I am not aware of any usage at all, and I cannot find any reference to anything related to that on the wiki. I think in any case that usage would be hampered by the current bad quality.

I support removal, and if somebody really needs them its easier to start from scratch anyway, as you have already mentioned.

Thanks for the reply, NKA. And for the other replies in the thread :- )