Why was Woodmont/Montgomery Avenue downgraded to secondary? It is essentially the eastbound lanes for Old Georgetown Road/East-West Highway.

Sorry for the late response, your changeset comment must have gotten buried in my emails.

The reason I changed these to sand is due to a desert being an area that receives little rainfall rather than being a specific landscape surface, the surface of the Mojave being sand. For comparison, a forest could be made up of several components - wood, scrub, water, bare rock, etc - whereas natural wood is just the trees themselves. By this logic, a desert could be a whole region with a mix of sand, heath, scrub, water, bare rock, scree, etc., or could simply be a very green heath-covered landscape like Northern Nevada is or one covered in permanent ice like Antarctica.

Another reason I tag these areas as sand is due to heath and scrub generally referring to much greener areas like the aforementioned northern region of Nevada, such as the Great Basin Desert. The Mojave Desert is covered in heath/scrub, however it's arguably more sand/gravel than vegetation. This scheme isn't entirely my idea though, and I've based it off how part of the Sonoran Desert is mapped around where California/Arizona/Baja California/Sonora meet.

Some of what I'm saying contradicts how I retagged these features, especially with the scrub overlapping the sand around Cima (though it could probably be easily fixed with some multipolygon-ing or realignments of the areas), and by my belief that a valley isn't really a landscape as much as it a geographical feature like a mountain would be and could be any surface. However, my intention was that this would be somewhat of a temporary solution for the Mojave Desert to be mapped, with the hopes that someone with a little more time than me could come and detail this area or if I just did it myself and separated the valleys and sand into their own relations, like I had started doing to some areas like the Amargosa Desert. It does seem a little redundant to have to re-map some areas that are already covered by natural=* polygons rather than simply retagging them like I did, but I do know that it could be an issue.

I agree with Kalorama Road being tertiary, but I also agree with your noting that it may be inconsistent. I think the section of Champlain Street that connects the two segments of Kalorama should be tertiary and that would fix it.

The OSM US Slack server, in the local-nyc channel.

I would eliminate a primary route along this road as a whole, since it isn't really used as a commuter route as much as the other primary roads in the area are. There can and will be secondary roads that link cities in the area that aren't tagged as primary for the sole reason that they're bypassed by/run parallel to a more significant route, the significant route in this case being Old Ox Road.

Fox Mill Road should not be primary, as West Ox Road or Fairfax County Parkway are much faster routes to take. Unlike Lawyers Road and Hunter Mill Road, Fox Mill Road has suitable and faster alternatives to it that run almost parallel to it.

This section should definitely remain primary considering it forms a straight shot between the Ashburn/Brambleton area down to Braddock Road and Gum Spring Road, which lead to Centreville and Manassas respectively.

Regarding road classification based on the type of populated place that it links, often times it will be trunk for cities, primary for towns, secondary for villages, and tertiary for hamlets. However, it is difficult to completely base a highway classification scheme around that since occasionally you will have towns that serves as major highway junctions or villages with little to nothing going on in them to warrant a secondary route.

Looking at the pages for primary, secondary, and tertiary classifications on the OSM Wiki:

The US primary definition is extremely vague, stating simply "Primary highway or arterial road." "Primary highway" could mean anything, from a primary state route, the primary road through a region, a primary arterial, etc., and so could "arterial road", as an arterial is simply a major road through an area.

The page for secondary is almost wholly Euro-centric, and lacks any table for country-specific definitions.

The US tertiary definition seems to be the only coherent one out of these, implying it could be for hamlet-connectors or urban/suburban collector roads.

These pages (or at least the ones for primary and secondary) definitely need to be reworked, but each of them are their own separate projects that need to be heavily discussed with other highway-oriented mappers throughout the US to get a consistent definition for how it should be applied in the country, and shouldn't be changed as the result of this discussion or at the discretion of a single user.

As road number-based classification, road should not be classified based on what its number is, since most of the time, especially for state routes, the number just implies how the road is funded. It definitely can be an indication that a road is a major highway, but it is very common to have secondary state routes and county roads play a role similar to what a primary highway would or for primary highways to be dead-end roads just shy from being literal driveways.

All that aside, I think that these roads should neither be classified based on vague/obsolete Wiki definitions nor their road number. I think having two dead-end secondary routes is confusing but primary might be overkill, at least for this alignment. It might be better to have either a secondary or primary route pass through here, but along Esworthy Road, rather than taking an unnecessary deviation towards a golf course. I doubt most traffic driving between Poolesville and Potomac will take a detour just to stay along state routes, and it looks like a lot of traffic does use Esworthy as a shortcut judging by tire track patterns visible from the aerial imagery and in street-level view. However, through trucks are prohibited on Esworthy Road, so I'm not completely sure.

I think it's worth noting that the road classification hierarchy on the OSM Wiki is obsolete, at least in the US and excluding trunk and motorway classifications. The definitions appear to be very European-oriented, since the bulk of the major roads in Europe were built on historic roads that connected directly between other villages, farms, POIs, etc, whereas in the US, that scheme is prevalent, but a lot of the country was planned out rather than built through time and has repurposed these roads as arterial roads or has built entirely new roads that simply intend to connect other roads rather than populated places.

These roads (Seneca, River, and Esworthy) at one point most likely connected between some hamlets at some point, but now serve as links between other distant towns (like Poolesville and Bethesda) or work as collector/arterial roads that serve Travilah and Potomac. Primary might be overkill, but I certainly think that there should be an established route through the area that indicates these roads are part of a direct connection between places like Poolesville, Travilah, Potomac, Bethesda, and DC that doesn't jump between two classifications spontaneously.

I think there should be a primary route here, but it would be better if it shortcut through Esworthy Road, because this appears to be the most direct route between Poolesville and Bethesda.

This route actually is used by commuters travelling between Fairfax/Oakton/Vienna to VA 7 towards Loudoun County rather than for getting to Reston or serving as a commercial thoroughfare. There are other similar two-lane semi-rural roads in the region that serve as commuter routes, like Yates Ford Road/Clifton Road, Gum Spring Road, and Lawyers Road.

The Dulles Greenway is a toll road so it isn't necessarily part of the trunk network, and there also isn't really anything of significance at the junction of LCP and the Greenway. Old Ox Road at the least connects towards IAD, Sterling Herndon, and Reston, but I think that the whole thing, including my changes, should be reverted wholly to primary. I feel like someday, if there is a more direct highway extension between Gainesville and South Riding as has been proposed for a while now, I could see the reason for a trunk route within this vicinity, but for now it would be best for these roads to remain primary since they don't serve much of the purpose that they were intended to yet.

Most secondary routes in Virginia aren't important enough to be trunk, as the ones that were in the past were added to the primary state route system. I don't actually think there are any secondary routes tagged as trunk besides from LCP currently.

LCP doesn't really have much along it, other than some SFH subdivisions and office/industrial parks, whereas FCP and PWP link town/city centers. LCP also doesn't really outstand from the other divided arterial roads like it in the eastern Loudoun area. It isn't high-speed like FCP or PWP are for most of their routes, and doesn't serve as an intercity/transregional connector like the other two parkways do.

Traffic along LCP will mostly be local traffic whereas a trunk route like VA 28 or US 15 will be carrying traffic that could be travelling between Manassas and Frederick. Though it was not built to be one, it functions like a business route of VA 28 like US 1 is along I 95, US 29 is along I 66, or VA 236 is along I 495, despite it veering away from it near the DTR.

The most important local roads should always be primary. The trunk network is for non-freeway highways that serve a similar purpose to what an Interstate does, and for that reason, I really don't think that there should be any trunk routes within the box of VA 7, US 15, US 50, and VA 28, at least for the time being if something like the Bi-County Parkway is built.

Hello, this route is actually signed as part of the VA 236 West route, despite it following a two-way road. If you're going west along 236/Main Street before the split, there is a sign directing 236 West traffic to make a right onto Blenheim Boulevard, and then along Blenheim, there is a reassurance sign with arrows directing traffic onto North Street, and eventually traffic is lead back to Main Street. It is confusing, but the pre-existing configuration before your changes was correct.

Hello, I'm not too sure about having the trunk route follow Loudoun County Parkway all the way north to One Loudoun. VA 28 already serves the purpose of being the primary north-south connector between Dulles and VA 7 and makes LCP act as more of an arterial or business route (though it was built after VA 28). The pre-existing trunk route served a better purpose of connecting South Riding towards Sterling, Herndon, and Reston (and I am almost inclined to extend it further east to VA 7 to act as a DTR bypass and link Tysons), but I'm also not even sure if that should be a trunk route or should be reverted to primary despite me being the one who upgraded. All that I am sure if is that LCP isn't as important as Fairfax County and Prince William Parkways, which serve as major trans-regional routes and link between cities like Woodbridge to Fairfax to Reston and Woodbridge to Manassas to Gainesville respectively.

Why did you extract the tags from buildings to points in this edit?

Hello, two things here:

1. Why was this small river area added to the river area multipolygon relation of the West Branch Susquehanna River?

2. Please remember to fully-close multipolygons so that it can render on the map.

Between those two issues, your edit broke the rendering of the West Branch Susquehanna River. I've fixed it now.

Ah, that makes sense.

Hello, please try to save your changes in one general vicinity before editing in another to avoid creating such a large changeset box and having your edits queue up in OSMCha for places that you didn't make any edits in. Thanks.

Hello, please try to save your changes in one general vicinity before editing in another to avoid creating such a large changeset box and having your edits queue up in OSMCha for places that you didn't make any edits in. Thanks.