Edits to reference name to more clearly and consistently describe the TEXpress, Express, and HOV lane system

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Thank you for these details – as someone who occasionally maps and uses the map in North Texas, I’d say we’ll take all the help we can get.

I spot-checked @Jonathan_Cupit’s changes and found them to be reasonable in general. A couple notes:

  • Some of the changesets (example) tagged roadways with toll=Yes or toll=No. The toll=* key should be set to a Boolean value, either yes or no in lowercase. Mainstream editors should already be enforcing these keywords; if your editor is allowing capitalized spellings, that would be a bug.
  • Name tags should spell out any abbreviations, other than common initialisms like “U.S.” that people normally keep abbreviated. I think name=Interstate Highway 30 HOV would be preferable to I 30 HOV. But also consider that some of these roadways might not have names apart from their route numbers, in which case name=* can be left blank. (noname=yes affirms that the lack of a name is intentional.)

The “TEXpress” branding is important to include in the roadway’s name=*, but the ref=* key on individual roadways is somewhat outmoded tagging convention. These days, we also model routes as route relations. This roadway is part of a “35Express” route relation. The Texas route tagging guide is silent on this kind of highway, but I think the route relation’s network=US:I:Express:Toll tag is consistent with the IH 25E shield with Express above and Toll below route markers. For example, OpenStreetMap Americana interprets this tag by marking it with an I-35E Express shield. (It also colors the roadway yellow based on toll=yes.)

I 35 TEXpress marked with an I-35E Expr shield.

Since you’ve taken an interest in ref=* formatting, you may be interested in this discussion about whether the ref=* tags on ways should use a postal abbreviation or align with real-world abbreviations:

I still remember when most Texas state highways were tagged like “SH 12”. I think we could return to that practice, and maybe even TxDOT’s unique “IH” prefix, if enough mappers from the state (including from your team) reach a consensus to do so. Regardless, if the organizations you work with are attempting to consume ref=* from the ways, we’d really encourage you to migrate to route relations. The unstructured ref=* key can’t really accommodate the extreme diversity of route networks in Texas.

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