Thanks for following up. It’s so easy to lose track of discussions like this after the initial burst of activity. I don’t have a strong opinion on the hyphen – even if I did, the format for Interstates would be a bigger fish to fry.
Remember to update the wiki based on the new consensus. Here are the pages that come to mind, though there may be others:
- Tag:network=US:UT - OpenStreetMap Wiki
- United States roads tagging/Routes - OpenStreetMap Wiki
- Custom Highway Shields - OpenStreetMap Wiki
- Utah/Naming Conventions - OpenStreetMap Wiki
- User:SD Mapman/United States/State-Specific State Highway "ref" Tags - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Mapbox will be affected by this change. They do some custom processing to associate “UT” refs with Utah state routes in their vector tiles. The Mapbox Standard style will start showing a rectangle with the “SR” prefix instead of the beehive shield:
For reference, OSM Americana has no problem, because route relations don’t require ref=* content sniffing:
Mapbox correctly handles the “SR” prefix in Ohio but not in Indiana (which reverted to this prefix in 2018), so they have the capability to handle it in Utah too. There’s probably a regular expression buried somewhere in their SQL code that they’ll need to update.
At this point, if a renderer is selecting state-specific shields based on the old regular expression trick, we should consider it technical debt on their part and urge them to upgrade to route relations. But at least Mapbox is scoping their pattern matching to specific states, so I gave them a heads up in Slack to update their heuristics. Some other renderers may also be affected, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
It might also be worth taking a look at addr:street=* values along Utah’s state routes. Street addressing is famously more flexible than OSM tagging, but the the “UT” format in that key is probably influenced by the ref=* tags you’re changing more than by any particular adherence to on-the-ground or postal usage.