I see some possible tension between these goals. Earlier you made the case (which I agree with) that the traffic signs should be accessible to every mapper via presets. If so, does it really matter whether there’s a comprehensive set of human-readable values that’s as precise as the sign IDs? With the human-readable values, someone who isn’t using presets will still need to rummage through a very long list of hyper-specific values for all but the most common signs. This is the status quo of course, but I just wonder if it’s worth agonizing over this use case if we can rely on presets.
The other aspect of these human-readable values is that there are no country namespaces, so you’re expecting us to harmonize every country’s signs according to an international system. This places an extra burden on countries that don’t adhere to the Vienna Convention and so have never needed to align their signs to those of other countries. For example, what does regulatory=building_direction mean? Do we have a sign like that in the U.S.? Maybe under a very different name?
If you’ve already attempted to classify signs from multiple countries according to this system, I’d suggest presenting a correspondence table to each country’s forum category so they can spot any incorrect translations. After all, you need to be very familiar with the driving laws in a country in order to interpret its sign standard correctly. At a glance, I find regulatory=toll_pass_only somewhat amusing. It’s clearly a reference to the following sign in the MUTCD, which was renumbered from M4-20 to R3-31 a couple weeks ago:
There’s actually no such thing as “TollPass”. This is the federal government’s fictional brand representing any electronic toll collection system’s logo. (Real examples include EZPass, FasTrak, and PikePass, all documented on the payment wiki page.) I wonder what other misunderstandings have arisen because you haven’t reached out more directly and proactively to each local community for input.
In those six years, I guess either the clunky mailing list stood in the way of sign nerds like us noticing your proposal, or we didn’t take it seriously enough. Now that you’ve brought it to a head by implementing your proposal regionally, we’re faced with a choice to keep the changes or refine them – especially since the tagging scheme you’ve designed seems to focus on international harmonization. If you wanted feedback without the rush, I suppose you could’ve conducted a smaller-scale edit and proactively asked for feedback on this forum. But here we are.
Two weeks sounds like a pretty short turnaround time for a proposal that frankly hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves until now. Most successful proposals of this magnitude take several weeks longer to get into shape, especially if multiple people are involved.