- Hey everyone. There was a multiple mutual edit-reversal recently regarding how to tag road 430 (that was reclassified from hitra cesta H2 to regionalna cesta 430 in 2020). I made the road as highway=secondary (same as the rest of the 430 road leading to Celje) and user mb64 reverted it to be highway=trunk. This was their argument:
This part of the road still functions like a highway, DARS still requires heavy vehicles over 3.5 tons to pay tolls. The reclassification as a regional road was done for bureaucratic purposes, because the law forbids levying tolls on all vehicles.
Here’s my argumentation for tagging 430 to a lower importance road. Once the eastern Maribor motorway bypass A1 was fully completed, international freight and long-distance travellers were successfully rerouted around the city (from H2 to A1). Hence we have to reassign the highway class according to its new role. The H2 effectively became an urban artery rather than an international highway, so its “expressway” status no longer matched its actual use. Leaving H2 marked as a trunk road would confuse drivers and routing software into driving thru the city instead of using a bypass. So, in my opinion we should also demote it to lower level of importance according to its reclassification.
Since there were no official Slovenian OSM rules codified in the wiki, so I decided to prepare a poll for the community to decide what guidelines we should follow when tagging OSM.
- Option A: Tag roads strictly Aligned With its Official Status
Proposal: We tag roads strictly based on their official government or administrative classification (e.g., avtocesta, hitra cesta, regionalna cesta etc.). This completely removes subjectivity from mapping and makes tagging easy and verifiable, ensures flawless compatibility with state open-data registries, especially that Slovene gov-t is quick to update the status of roads.
3.Option B*: Tag roads by their actual role in the transport network
Proposal: Roads are classified primarily by their actual role in the transport network, meaning the economic scale and traffic volume of the town/cities/countries they connect. This ensures optimal performance for navigation software and routing engines, as the map logic mirrors real-world driver behavior. This is a standard Global OSM Approach, since often road classification lags behind roads actual usage.
4.Option C*: Tag according to road’s infrastructure
Proposal: Roads are tagged strictly according to their visible, physical characteristics on the ground, such as the number of lanes, presence of central dividers, and type of junctions (ramps vs. regular crossroads). This creates a highly visual and consistent map that immediately communicates a road’s driving capacity to users looking at the map.
- Here are some cons for these approaches:
6.Option A*: The “Bypassed Village” Problem: When a new motorway or high-speed bypass is built, the old national road running through the town center often retains its official “National Road” status for years due to bureaucratic lag, even though 90% of the traffic moved to the new bypass. Mapping by state class forces you to keep the congested town center road tagged higher than it should be functionally.
7.Option B*: The main drawback is that it introduces a lot of human subjectivity, which can lead to extended community debates regarding edge-case roads. This approach is mostly used when official road status lags behind road’s actual use pattern.
8.Option C*: This entirely disconnects the road’s tag from its actual geographic importance, meaning a wide, local urban avenue could end up with a higher tag than a narrow but critical international highway. And this goes against the general OSM highway tagging rules. Also, OSM already has a massive ecosystem of tags specifically designed to capture infrastructure (lanes=4, dual_carriageway=yes, junction=interchange, toll:hgv=yes). Using the main highway=* tag only to describe physical size makes those secondary tags redundant and leaves no tag left to describe network importance. Navigators calculate optimal routes based heavily on the highway=* tag hierarchy. If a strategic, single-carriageway mountain pass is the only link between two regions, Option C would tag it low because it is narrow. Routing software would then deprioritize it, sending truck drivers on massive detours.
I think that in reality we should stick with option B. But since this often leads to differing opinions, and the official classification is, at least in Slovenia, mostly very accurate, let’s stick with option A, unless we all (or the vast majority of us) agree that the official classification is inappropriate (or outdated, as you mentioned). But these are just exceptions, not the rule – so for me, it’s option A :)
I hope that summarizes it all.
, no?