Eastern Avenue here started off being tagged as highway=tertiary and has been upgraded to primary and secondary by 6totheworld. The part that became secondary is the two-lane part with painted bike lanes.
highway=trunk switching down to highway=primary which then becomes highway=secondary mid-block. I am guessing it’s not coincidental that the change on Woodbine Avenue is where bike lanes start and car lane count drops.
So is this tagging highway classification primarily according to number of lanes? That is generally not good practice in OSM; lane count is encoded in the lanes tag.
It’s not an absolute rule, but highway classification in OSM should generally be continuous, and “stubs” of higher class roads like this should be avoided. highway=primary should generally connect to another highway=primary. There are exceptions in “end of the road” kind of places, or in some cases where traffic genuinely distributes in a number of directions, but this shouldn’t be the case in the centre of a large city where there is a dense road network.
@6totheworld, what are your thoughts on the posts above?
Sadly it has now been 7 days since @6totheworld was last active, and no response to our concerns.
I am inclined to request a wholesale revert of their road classification changes.
Existing/previous classifications can of course be changed or tweaked later, following some discussion.
(Maybe we do want to upgrade most suburban arterials to primary? But it would have to be done systematically, and while maintaining some sort of hierarchy with the trunks. If anyone’s inclined, let’s talk…)
Hi Jarek, I just got unbanned last night, this was why i was unresponsive. I will read everything above in the coming days, I do think surburban arterials should be upgraded for the most part and I also agree that some changes I made in the core were incorrect. Was figuring out last week how to revert these types of things but ran into issues when my account got banned. Regarding the woodbine comment I think I read earlier it ended there not because of lanes or parking but becasue that is the end of lakeshore blvd.
I believe people blocked from editing the map can still comment here on the forum, but I understand where the confusion would come from.
I am hoping for more substance from you.
Upon reflection, do you think your changes in downtown Toronto should be kept? If yes, which ones?
If yes, can you state how you would rank the following streets in a hierarchy using the tags available in OSM, namely: trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified? trunk should be used for the most important non-freeway roads in the entire province, or at very least in all of southern Ontario, then subsequent ranks are relatively less important. Using a rank for more than one street is OK.
Lake Shore Boulevard (Humber to Don)
Jarvis Street
University Avenue
Yonge Street (any stretch you choose for sake of discussion)
Church Street
Harbord Street
Sussex Avenue
Queens Quay East
Beverley Street
Mercer Street
Please make sure to observe the following guidelines:
Number of lanes does not directly indicate road classification
Classification of a street or road should not downgrade and then resume, unless there are significant physical or legal restrictions, in which event the higher classification should be routed continuously around the restrictions as signed or as used in practice
Road classification should generally not dead end in a stub of higher classification, except for major destinations like airports or entire towns
When updating a road, please go through a longer stretch so that the road network is a coherent whole
Freeways should generally contain at least one interchange (otherwise it’s just a divided road with no intersections)
Yes, but we don’t change classification for road name changing. It’s a network.
