Hello. Just to let you know, the ramp you mapped here no longer exists and was demolished a couple years ago. The interchange right here is being reworked.

What makes these changes unsubstantiated? How a road serves in the local road network can be explained by its connectivity with destinations/other roads (its usage as an arterial, collector, etc.) and traffic counts.

Yes, I think so

There probably shouldn't be a natural area encompassing all of Las Vegas as not the entirety of the city is sand. This tag should only apply to desert sand on its own rather than the ground on which the city is built on top of.

To my knowledge, there doesn't seem to be any sort of project like that happening on the 215. My guess, based on OpenWeb imagery, is that these are just temporarily walled-off shoulders for construction vehicle access and for workers to have a barricaded area to do work on the overpasses/pillars from the middle of the highway.

I'm a little confused with what the motorway ways with the sand surface are intended to represent.

If these are under construction ways, I would either add no surface tag at all, since an under-construction road's surface changes rapidly based on the progress of the project, or add the surface of what the roadway will have when completed (e.g. asphalt, concrete).

If these are temporary alignments, considering that they are placed right beside the mainline carriageways of the freeway rather than them being a major diversion, I would just not map them.

When it comes to construction, it's better not to over-map it. Construction projects change rapidly in real time, in many cases faster than OSM data can be downloaded, so adding temporary dirt roads for construction vehicle access, minor realignments for traffic to bypass road work, overly-detailed tagging for what surface a way is, etc. can actually be counterintuitive by providing information that is bound to be outdated by the time routers and renderers receive this information.

The best course of action for a road interchange like this one would be to:

- delete anything that's been demolished
- change anything from highway=construction to a routable highway tag like motorway or motorway link when it's fully-accessible
- avoid mapping anything that's only temporary (like minor road realignments and track roads created by construction vehicles), unless it's a significant road realignment that is necessary for providing accurate routing (such as a lengthy or long-term detour). Same logic would apply with the hazard=roadworks tag. While documented, it's usage is discouraged for short-term construction subject to rapid real-world change.

Additionally, no road in this complex, complete or under-construction, should be tagged with any other sort of surface other than one that it's intended to be typically, which in this case would be something like asphalt, concrete, or simply paved. A surface like highway=sand on highway=motorway would imply an actual freeway made of sand, which would be quite absurd. For roads under construction, while a they're definitely going to be consistent of gravel, sand, dirt, etc. while being graded, the surface tag that should be used is the one that the road surface will truly be upon completion. The only case in which I'd use an unpaved surface tag like sand or dirt on an under-construction way would only happen in a less common instance like a hiking trail that's in the process of being officially marked.

These roads, in their current state, don't serve any major development or destinations or provide any service to through traffic, and currently have very low traffic counts since this area is quite underdeveloped in its current state. I wouldn't classify most roads in this area any higher than unclassified or tertiary, since it will likely be a couple more years until this area is built up enough to warrant such high classification for these roads.

To answer your question regarding classification here—I wouldn't overthink it. It probably makes more sense to tag a short road leading to a few smallish gated communities as unclassified/residential. The NHS designation is here automatically because this small section of roadway is part of St. Rose Pkwy rather than it being a crucial part of the National Highway System. I also don't think it would be a major issue just to leave the tiny segments of road at intersections like this one here as primary (or whatever classification another similar example would have) despite that technically being tagging for the renderer, only because we're talking such small segments rather than a more noticeable and confusing stub.

Hello, Arlington Boulevard should not be tagged as a motorway. While it is limited-access, through this segment, it has a relatively low speed limit (45 mph), an arterial road-like median, sidewalks, and very tight ramps. The best classification for this section would be trunk with the 'expressway=yes' tag.

Places in OSM aren't classified based on their legal status but rather their population and regional importance, and the place classification hierarchy is not 1-1 with these legal classifications either given that they vary by state and country. The tagging scheme works similar to how on a globe or physical map labels will appear larger and bolder based on a city or town's population and prominence. South Carolina has 71 municipalities that are incorporated as cities, but a lot of them have very low populations, such as Chesnee with 829. Putting these places in the same boat as Columbia, Charleston, or even smaller regionally-significant places like Orangeburg and Anderson would be excessive.

Since this is such a short section and these are only minor informal at-grade track road connections, mostly made by by maintenance vehicles, off road vehicles, and traffic trying to take shortcuts from the frontage roads, I think leaving it as motorway here should be fine. Most Interstates and rural freeways will have sporadic dirt roads spurring off them, and it seems especially common in western states.

I would say the latter would look better and be more accurate just because the circularized areas here would imply that the trees actually do form a clearcut circle around the houses like that in reality, while a rough estimation tracing the canopy of the woods would at least be more true to the actual shape of the woods.

That aside, huge thank you for mapping all this landuse and woods around the Danville area. You've clearly put a lot of time an effort into this project making this area that was just recently completely blank look more colorful and well-mapped.

I wouldn't say that a road that could be used as an alternative route to bypass traffic through a bottle neck as an alt route for commuters would be best tagged as a trunk road, especially since I 15 is the main route through here, effectively making it (if we were to be technical and go by the literal definition of a "trunk road") the trunk road through this area. Major alt routes seem like this one example seem like a good case for primary. Not to mention, this road isn't an expressway in the present day so that it can handle commuter traffic, rather this is an old alignment of US Route 395 that has been repurposed, now effectively serving as a business route/frontage road. It's pretty clear to me judging by the addition of bike lanes as well that the intention is to just reintegrate this old highway segment into the highway system without going out of the way and demolishing the interchanges/overpasses. Another attribute is that the traffic volume of Kearny Villa Rd is way lower than I-15's. The reason I-15 gets so backed up and forces some amount of traffic onto an arterial road like Kearny Villa is because it is the primary through route handling the vast majority of long-distance traffic.

Additionally, I wouldn't tag all expressways as trunk, especially short, disconnected ones and/or ones that are already bypassed by motorways. Expressway-based trunk classification is something that the OSM US highway community has been trying to eliminate for a while as physical construction does not necessarily equate a road's importance (while trunk roads are intended to be the most important of important roads, which may include expressways, but not all), and I think the California highway mappers have done a good job trying to get rid of these "trunk stubs".

Hello, what is the reason for tagging Kearny Villa Road as trunk here? This isn't a major long-haul or commuter route of any sort, as it's an old alignment of US Route 395 when it passed through SoCal, and all through traffic has since been rerouted to Interstate 15. At most, this just acts as your typical primary-classified arterial thoroughfare, albeit with expressway-like attributes.

Hello, why are the holes in the woods multipolygons circularized? Was this accidental or intentional?

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure which exact ones would be built soonest, other than some residential streets in multi-phase subdivision projects, or any other major road we know is scheduled to be built (like the Hollywood Blvd extension for example).

I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way and make a mass-deletion of them since in reality most of them aren't truly problematic more than they are sometimes annoying and inconvenient if they overlap with or are attached to a bunch of other features—but I also wouldn't discourage going about deleting them either. I would just suggest not mass-deleting them in the event there are some that are out there that are useful to keep (like I had mentioned in my above comment), but instead delete ones you find are in the way of what you're doing or any blatantly false ones you stumble across in ID. This strategy would probably be less time consuming and/or prone to breaking something than identifying which exact ones to keep out of the hundreds or so that exist in this area and deleting the identified ones in one changeset. Ultimately, it's probably not worth prioritizing because this object only renders in very select map styles and the data isn't ever used elsewhere (as far as I know).

The simplest solution, though, and the rule of thumb I go by now, would be to just not map proposed roads that aren't 100% confirmed or construction takes place in an unreasonably late date to even think about it in the present, and rather use it as a sort of scaffolding for mapping new road that do get built soon so you can quickly change them with the construction and get the data out there as soon as possible rather than have to take time and start fresh after construction has already started.

My pleasure. I appreciate the recognition!

I would say that all proposed highway ways should probably be deleted unless we know those roads are going to be built and their eminent construction is within a more reasonable timeframe where plans are less likely to change. The OSM Wiki even seems to hint at discouraging mapping proposed highways that truly are only in the proposal phase: highway=proposed

I personally have been going around deleting some of the ones I originally mapped myself, just because the data doesn't render and isn't used by anyone because it's not really mapping what's on the ground and can only be used as a sort of note as pre-mapping for upcoming construction in the near future.

Considering we don't have an actual date for construction of a freeway (if that even happens), I wouldn't worry about retaining or restoring anything here. If we consider how long it took for the Beltway to be built, or for how long it will take to get to building the 395 spur in Reno, we're talking about a project that, if confirmed, is likely so far into the future that there's a chance either one of us may not be interested in editing OSM anymore by the time the first shovel hits the dirt.

I would probably avoid mapping proposed highways like this one, especially since a full freeway here is likely at least a decade down the road. highway=proposed can be useful for mapping out roads that are to be built in the near future so they can be quickly changed to highway=construction, but one like this where the ROW still needs to be acquired and the actual construction is so far into the future where anything could happen (the routing could be altered, it could be downgraded to an arterial rather than a freeway, or could not happen at all, etc.) is effectively just some more clutter in the editor that makes it a little more difficult to edit around it, especially since these ways cross many other roads and unmapped features like houses. Generally, the less ways the don't render on the map (abandoned, demolished, proposed, etc.), the better.

OSM doesn't exactly have a threshold for how much population a place needs to be classified as a city. Wyoming has no cities that come close to passing 100k in population, but has 10 places tagged as cities in OSM. Colorado itself has a notable example—Grand Junction—which has 65.5k pop. as of 2020 but has been tagged as a city on OSM since 2010.

Additionally, multiple examples of legal towns tagged as cities and legal cities tagged as town. A place's legal status is arbitrary in the grand scheme of things as a map user is likely not concerned with the legal status of a place but rather its size and regional importance.

I found one mention of Parker on the OSM Wiki, but this doesn't seem to revolve around place classification and only use the word "town" as Castle rock is legally a home rule town while Parker is a municipality that self-declares itself a town.

"Colorado has two basic divisions for incorporated municipalities, towns and cities, though Colorado law makes relatively few distinctions between the two. "In general, cities are more populous than towns, although the towns of Castle Rock and Parker have more than 45,000 residents each, while the city of Black Hawk has fewer than 120 residents."

This excerpt, at least from my perspective, would actually be a good argument for why legal status is arbitrary, considering a legally-defined city like Black Hawk can have a tiny population while places that are legally municipalities, towns, villages, hamlets, census-designated places, unincorporated communities, etc. can have varying populations and in many instances be larger in population and more important to its region than what places local governments have decided to classify as a "city".