The University of Virginia village node refers to the populated place (encompassing the university and surrounded areas apart from it) that exists here rather than the university: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Virginia_(census-designated_place),_Virginia

Please do not delete and re-map roads, and please remember to map the center of the road as one straight way like the other nearby streets and to connect it to other roads properly.

Gates functionally form a dead-end if they aren't open to the public, and this gate appears to not be accessible by anyone, hence the culdesac for turning around. A road that can't be traveled from one end to the other by regular traffic 2/47 probably shouldn't be classified higher than unclassified or residential or else it's misleading, as secondary classification usually implies it's a busy commercial arterial road, connects to other major roads at each end, has something of significance like a village/town or airport at its terminus in the instance it is a dead-end road, or anything along the lines of those.

Looking at the Bing Maps streetside imagery, there appears to have been a gate here for a while. My guess is that historically this road linked Flanders and Netcong but simply no longer does and just maintains the name, and that US 206 functionally serves as the bypass.

I should note that it is very common for dead-end roads, unpaved roads, or roads without lane markings throughout the US to have 40+ speed limits in rural scenarios, whether that speed limit may be a relic of when the road served as a major highway but is now a local road or is simply there because the road is lightly traveled. It's also very typical for roads that hit dead-ends like this one to retain their lane markings if they're functionally converted to local roads like in this situation. Not sure why, but I assume it has more to do with how the DOT maintains the road versus for any navigational purposes.

Hello, this road shouldn't be secondary or tertiary regardless of its physical characteristics. Residential or unclassified is the best classification for a dead-end road. Secondary classification is more applicable to examples which connect other major roads and communities, like Hillside Avenue.

I think MD 4 and 5 make sense as motorways given their longer lengths, higher speeds, and bigger number of grade separation; their intentions appear to be to serve as freeways, as opposed to 210, which is rather a typical limited-access highway with a few interchanges in a row within a short distance. MD 4 currently is isolated from other freeways, but some upgrades are supposed to happen at the Suitland/Presidential intersection, turning it into an interchange at some point. Not sure whether that's supposed to remove the other signalized intersections, however. MD 5 seems to me to be a very good example of a non-interstate motorway spur, in where it has a freeway-to-freeway connection with another motorway (except with I 495 west to MD 5 north) as well as all the other requirements like a speed limit of at least 55, grade separations throughout its length, and a length indicating these aren't just grade separations consequentially adjacent but rather a proper freeway.

To me it is fine to have isolated motorways just as long as the highways being tagged as such are intended to be freeways as opposed to roads that look like freeways but have some sort of violation (bike/pedestrian infrastructure without grade separation, low speed limit, lack of median) or very short length.

I'll go ahead and do that. I've been removing these sort of short controlled-access sections of highways tagged as motorways as of recent. Considering the addition of bicycle infrastructure, its relatively low speed limit (45 mph), its short length, and a myriad of other non-freeway characteristics, downgrading this section makes sense to me.

Please slow down with the mass-retagging of populated places. Mass changes like these should be discussed first. The place classification hierarchy definitions on the OSM are mostly Euro-centric, so a lot of these edits you are making are incorrect. Please consider joining the OSM US Slack server if you're interested in making these sort of changes so that they may be discussed further: https://app.slack.com/client/T029HV94T/

Hello, I have reverted your recent edits for a couple reasons:

- The commercial area here should not have been retagged to a building. Building tags are for the buildings themselves, not the area around them. The commercial area landuse tag was correct in this case.

- "Food Quality" and "Friendly" are not existing tags on OpenStreetMap. The tags should be used for things that can be proven on the ground or with a website, not something you would need to take another user's word for.

- "Possible Building" is a very vague changeset comment that doesn't exactly confirm whether a building exists or not. For things that do not yet show up on imagery, it's good to provide a source if possible.

I'm probably misremembering what edits I made here since it was almost a year ago, looking at it now it looks like I didn't eliminate any trunk stubs, but I didn't create any either. I created a trunk connection from NE 2 east to link to the US 75 north ramp and one from the US 75 south ramp to connect to NE 2 west.

I don't believe I created any trunk spurs in this edit, but rather eliminated the trunk stub by downgrading the trunk route to the ramps. It might be easier to see what I did in ID.

It's possible for primary and even secondary and tertiary roads to have expressway-like interchanges. Tagging schemes such as expressway=yes as well as access_control=partial can be used to indicate that.

Hello, the route between I 95 and I 695 shouldn't be tagged as trunk since there isn't really a relatively large amount of traffic that uses this route combination, other than what would be local traffic heading towards the Edgemere area (which isn't significant enough to warrant a trunk route). Primary seems best for here in this case.

I have in the past considered the unincorporated territory located outside official municipal boundaries that is addressed to or is located within the same ZIP code when reclassifying places. I think this can be criterial but not definitive to whether a place is or is not a village, town, city, etc.

Generally, when mapping populated places, I'd rather apply a place node to a community that has borders which are federally-recognized in some way rather than take the word from people in the area, because the way someone might describe where they're from or the experience of how they know a place as varies by person. I've heard people say they're from "DC" but that ends up being Arlington, Virginia. One might also say they're from Reno or Las Vegas but it's actually Sparks or Henderson. I live in a CDP myself, and how I say where I am from varies between the specific CDP I am in, the place my home is addressed to, or the primary city of the metro area it is located in. If you simply follow the designation of a place intended to be equivalent to a place with a name, borders, and a population but no local government, then you avoid any COI. While I do think some semblance of local knowledge is important on OSM, I do think relying on a greater source similar to how Wikipedia does is too, at least for things like these.

As for place=suburb tagging, indicative by its European name and most common usage, it is intended be used for what would be simply a large neighborhood in the US rather than the informal American term "suburb" which means a myriad of things, like a smaller town nearby a larger city, a small residential subdivision, the outskirts of a city, etc. Sun Valley and Spanish Springs are functionally more akin to towns rather than neighborhoods within a city. Sun Valley even has its own municipal address, with Spanish Springs having an acceptable alternative city name. I think that makes them stand out a little more than as suburbs by OSM definitions.

I also think that it isn't necessary for a community to have a central business district, though that does strengthen their independence from nearby cities. Sun Valley does have Sun Valley Boulevard which acts like a "downtown" even if it doesn't look like one. The corridor houses most of the area's commercial buildings as well as the Sun Valley Community Park and the post office. Spanish Springs also has a main commercial area at the intersection of La Posada and Eagle Canyon at Pyramid Way. These aren't the first places you'll think of when you imagine a proper downtown area, but many, if not most towns and cities that started developing after the mid-20th century when cars hit the mainstream look like this, especially throughout the Sun Belt region. Cape Coral, FL is a good example of this, where its downtown is mostly pad sites and strip malls in a city center-like grid.

Fernley is better classified as a city in my opinion. It's one of the principal cities of the Reno-Sparks-Fernley CSA (which should be taken with a grain of salt as it's loosely defined), and is significantly larger than nearby places classified as towns such as Dayton and Fallon. I also think putting it up against Reno and Carson City is unfair considering they render at a different level which indicates their population/status as a capital over the less significant cities which render at zoom level 7 such as Winnemucca, Elko, and Ely.

I also want to talk about a couple other places, like Sun Valley and Spanish Springs. By US standards, they would informally be "suburbs", but the tag place=suburb uses a Euro-centric name is explained best by the OSM wiki as a "a major area in a place=town or place=city with a distinct and recognized local name and identity". Places perfectly fitting this definition are the five boroughs of New York City or more loosely-defined named areas like Stead in Reno or Centennial Hills in Las Vegas. Sun Valley and Spanish Springs are census-designated places fully-located outside of any incorporated community.

A lot of the villages you downgraded to hamlets are better tagged as villages to better reflect their populations. Places with such a population as Wadsworth (which is 991) are often tagged as villages and sometimes even towns in the US. Place=hamlet like basically all place=* tags is very Euro-centric and will inevitably need to be used differently to varying degrees depending on the country. It's better to make judgement on how a place should be classified based on its local surroundings rather than to refer to the OSM Wiki which typically uses descriptions that are universally broad or specific to Europe unless stated that it applies to the US or a specific US state.

Hello, do you know if these roads are actually open/under construction? As far as I know, construction of the community was postponed indefinitely due to concerns regarding water and wildlife and has not yet resumed.

I have reviewed this OSM Wiki page in the past, but I (and, judging by the OSM US Slack server, many other people) try to avoid and highly recommend avoiding functional classification data. Functional classification from DOTs generally do not line up with OSM's guidelines regarding roads and are mainly intended to display how the roads are funded and maintained by the DOT rather than reflect the road's importance for civilian navigation. Rather, a basis on what major destinations (populated places, commercial areas, airports, etc.) and other major roadways a road links to is what should be used for classification rather than how the state describes it for what are primarily internal purposes. Additionally, AADT data is useful to determining how important a road is relative to nearby roads that serve a similar purpose, but should certainly not be relied upon always.

Hello, it looks like in many of your recent edits, you're creating a lot of disconnected road segments. For example, Route B from US 54 to Tanner Bridge Road. This particular road would be better fit as a primary route since the trunk route "dead-ends" abruptly and doesn't appear to have any higher importance than the rest of the road.

Excluding motorways, in most cases, a road should be the same classification until it meets another road of the same or higher classification and should not abruptly drop or increase in its classification at a point where its characteristics differ (such as the number of lanes or speed limit changing) or when it meets its terminus or another intersection with road of a lower classification. This is to maintain general consistency on the map itself and provide more consistent information to navigation systems that use OSM data.

No worries, it can be confusing because the only rendering difference between the highway links and the roads that they connect to on OSM Carto are that the links render slightly thinner and do not render road numbers when tagged with them. Thank you for your response and happy mapping!

Hello, welcome to OpenStreetMap! I'm going to just let you know that it's reasonable and common for motorway links to have at-grade intersections including signalized ones as they're often intended to connect to other non-freeway roads anyway, and ramps like these should remain motorway links. It's rather that the motorways themselves should not have any signalized intersections along them except for when it's at a terminus.

LOL my bad! Thanks for correcting it for me. :)