Recently I have been editing trunk roads in the southern states, my edits have been mostly thanked by users. Recently, however, zsneese has been reverting my edits, threatening:

 Please do not make changes to an area that you are not familiar with. There are much bigger issues on OSM that need to be corrected in other areas than nitpicking a trunked road (which you are incorrect about)... the roads that I am editing are accurate and consistent with our government mapping provided with us by the State of Georgia Department of Transportation. I will be correcting this and I will correct it every single time it is changed.

GDOT standards don’t mean much on OSM though! The Eastern States definition is:

...in the east, the tag is only used for roads which are a "Surface expressway": A relatively high-speed divided road (at least 40 MPH with a barrier or median separating each direction of traffic), with a limited amount of intersections and driveways.

Who is correct?

–floridaeditor

P.S. if you agree, will you help revert the edits using the JOSM reverter plugin for added authority?

Just 6 months ago, Florida was absolutely littered with incorrectly tagged trunk roads (i.e. US and state highways tagged as trunk rather than primary). The rendering of Florida looked like a bloodshot eye, and correctly tagged trunk roads (i.e. Pineda Causeway, US 27 in Everglades) were mixed with incorrect ones. The problem was made even worse by an editor who mainly edited the California area, by tagging correct primary roads as incorrect trunk roads[a].

To standardize the tagging of trunk roads in a general ‘east’ location[b], a general ‘trunk road in the East US guidelines’ was agreed upon:

• Road must have very few to no at-grade intersections (about 5 per county/parish);
• Road may or may not be divided (contrary to motorway);
• Road may be any speed;
• Road may have any designation;
• Road may or may not allow foot traffic, cycle traffic, etc.

Following the agreement of these guidelines, I set off to change Florida’s trunk route scheme. First I started with US 192/CR 15 (now tagged as primary/secondary) and just kept going, until finally Florida was clean[c]!

But it wasn’t done.

No, sir, we need a general tagging scheme in place for county, state, and non-designated streets. Putting guidelines in place (mainly following California’s with tweaks), I set off with Brevard and Orange counties in mind to fix. I am currently working on those projects.

Of course, this is not the only thing I do. If I go geocaching, I might add some park features at the park it was in. I might improve waterways[d], other businesses, etc. But my main focus continues to be on CR/SR/non-designated roads.

• [a] Standards differ between California and Florida.
• [b] TODO: east of Mississippi or straight down the center?
• [c] Fixing such a large state wasn’t easy, but it took about 3 months.
• [d] One of such edits turned out to be controversial, but it was cleared up.