To be clear, I never said that “only some countries care about the difference between roads and routes”. Obviously all countries mentioned above have their types of roads, and likely they all also classify local roads within cities (streets) differently from roads between or passing cities (including roads that are classified/named as routes). This is why network=*, highway=*, designation=* or other relevant tags are used to make any such distinction clear where needed.
So, above route=road is said to apply if respective road overlaps (or “traverses”) shorter roads that have different names. But then what about national roads or regional roads or let alone other types of local roads outside of cities that don’t overlap any shorter roads with different names? Are these also to be banned from using route=road then?
I still don’t think it is apt to compare routes like Oregon Route 126 with cycling routes, or bus routes or other similar routes. Word “route” has among its other senses the following two distinct senses, I quote from this dictionary entry: 1) “a course or way which is traveled or passed”, and 2) “a road or path; often specifically a highway”. Above you seem to make a case that routes like Route 126 are routes in sense 1 instead of sense 2, but at least for me, sorry, this isn’t convincing. (To be clear, I don’t have a problem with type=route being used for routes in both senses as this is just an arbitrary key value, and distinction is still made using route=* key.)
As for designation vs. construction, really both routes/highways outside of cities and local roads within cities are both built and and both can be designated. Road network can be rearranged both outside of cities and within cities, e.g. streets are also occasionally merged to form a new named street without any construction work, or entire streets too can be designated as main roads or secondary roads or alike, etc. Sure, there are also different designation authorities (national government, local government, NGO, or other), and different authorities that manage/build roads, but I don’t see what this has got to do with route/street distinction, as both roads outside of cities and within cities are normally designated/built/managed by some authority.
As for routers and software development, I haven’t tested these particular routers myself, I rely on descriptions provided above. And if it’s said that cardinal directions are added across the world based only on route=road, including in majority of countries where cardinal directions make little sense, then to me it seems quite clear that this feature needs further development. Above it was mentioned that some routers add only cardinal directions that are explicitly tagged, so these a few others could do the same. I also once more point out that overlapping road relations exist also without these that are for streets, and then somehow it still needs to be specified which level of road hierarchy or which road network is relevant for directions.
To me it doesn’t seem like route=road has to be redefined (or skunked) so that it could be used for streets. As I pointed out already in afore-mentioned changeset discussion, per wiki documentation it doesn’t seem like the use of this tag was ever limited in manner which is suggested here in this thread. Accordingly other people have also put inordinate effort to map and model road networks in their countries in national, regional and local levels using uniform data structure, and now here it’s told that due to some rather obscure reason large parts of this work should be redone. This would also mean that due to less uniform approach it’d be harder to use the road data. Also, as said earlier, it isn’t even clear which roads really should be redone (just streets, or also other local roads, or also certain national roads).
I also understand that originally route=road was used mainly for major routes, but as far as I can see it’s normal that people for a start map larger/major objects and then over time the data gets more detailed.
