Hi! It looks like you're making quite a large number of road classification changes across the LA area over the past couple days. Some of them seem perfectly fine to me (like upgrading Beverly Glen to secondary, or a lot of the various tertiary edits). But I don't agree with this change upgrading Hollywood Boulevard to primary, nor with a few other of your choices (like having Sunset primary through Sunset Strip, having Exposition primary at all, or having Gayley secondary in Westwood). Road classifications are certainly never exact, and I sometimes go off "gut feel", but given the extent of your edits, would you mind explaining what rationale you're using to make these major changes to the status quo? How are you picking what should be primary, secondary, etc?

Additionally, I (and anyone else who might come across these changesets presumably) would greatly appreciate if you could use more descriptive changeset comments in the future, so for instance "Upgraded Hollywood Blvd to primary based on such-and-such reasoning" would be much more helpful than just "Primary Road".

Thanks!
Will

Hi, what source are you using to find that this road has two lanes? I just removed the lanes=* value because based on a survey there were no lane markings at all, which appears to be corroborated by the latest aerials (Bing) and Streetside.

Best,
Will

Well, maybe Stony Island instead of Jeffrey: it's wider and gets exits from the Skyway and I-94. I guess that reinforces both the point that road classification is hard but also that the categories it attempts to represent are real. If you're interested, I actually wrote a whole diary post about the heuristics I came up with to decide urban road classification, although it was mostly put into practice in my current home of Los Angeles, much of which is of course a very different built environment than Chicago: @willkmis/diary/399345.

Sure, I agree that it's complicated. I don't think there's any single criterion you can use to separate primary from secondary in all cases. Fundamentally, the road classes represent a spectrum of importance, so at some point, judgment calls will have to be made. All I'm saying is that the current way Chicago is mapped does not in my view accurately represent the spectrum of road hierarchy, and I'd argue the policy of only upgrading state/US routes, while unambiguous, is a fairly arbitrary rule that doesn't correspond to much in reality. The multitude of other mappers that have come in and tried to change the primary tagging seems to support my opinion, but given that I don't live in Chicago anymore I'm not going to go in and start an edit war or anything. Just wanted to provide some feedback.

Re: the roads mentioned so far, honestly, at least Ohio/Ontario, Ida Wells, Columbus, Michigan at least north of Roosevelt or so, Roosevelt, Jeffrey, Ashland, and Western all seem like part of a reasonable primary network to me, in line with how most other US cities are mapped. That set is far from all of the secondary roads in the city.

No worries! Yeah that section is debatable, and it's gone back and forth in the past. Note that the part between La Tijera and Imperial is tagged with expressway=yes (see expressway=*), which is designed for situations where the road is built up to higher speed standards regardless of classification.

Hi, it looks like in this change you've upgraded PCH entirely to trunk between Venice and Dana Point. Can you describe your rationale for this change? In my experience, PCH acts essentially as a primary road in these areas, given that through traffic just gets on the 405 to go any significant distance.

In case you're not aware, highway=trunk tagging has been the point of some controversy in OSM. To address this, the California mapping community has come up with statewide guidelines for the trunk network, emphasizing connectivity and the "best" routes between major destinations. You can find the guidelines and their rationale here: osm.wiki/California/2022_Highway_Classification_Guidelines. As part of that, the tagging for CA 1 in the LA area was agreed to be as it was previously, as trunk only between CA 22 and CA 55 in Orange County. The guidelines are always subject to change, so if you'd like to advocate for your tagging, it might be nice to drop a post on the Discussion page on the wiki before making major changes. Let me know what you think!

Best,
Will

Hi Flierfy,
I see you've edited the 10 to be access=no due to the recent damage to the freeway. While it is true on the ground at this moment, I am not sure this change to OSM data is a good idea.

Recent news reports suggest the closure will only be for 3-5 weeks. The wiki only suggests tagging a road closure if the road will be closed >6 months: highway=construction. Since many data users only pull data every once in a while, that means the change could propagate for much longer than the road is actually closed. If this road closure is marked at all, then it should probably be a conditional restriction with an end date. Otherwise I think there’s a big risk that it’ll screw up routing on an important road segment for a really long time. I commented a similar note on changeset/143980941, which was then reverted.

Let me know what you think.

Will

I commented this on the OSMUS Slack, but I do not think this edit is a good idea. The wiki only suggests tagging a road closure if the road will be closed >6 months: highway=construction. Since many data users only pull data every once in a while, that means the change could propagate for much longer than the road is actually closed. I don’t feel comfortable changing this freeway to access=no at least until an expected timeline is announced, and even then it should probably be a conditional restriction with an end date. Otherwise I think there’s a big risk that it’ll screw up routing for a really long time

I modified the wiki in this change to reflect this discussion: osm.wiki/w/index.php?title=California%2F2022_Highway_Classification_Guidelines&type=revision&diff=2613176&oldid=2501813.

Happy mapping!
Will

And I'm not sure I buy your argument about the state/US routes. North appears to have the same number of lanes and roughly the same frequency of signals as lots of other roads in the area that it looks like you've downgraded from primary to secondary in the past, like Ashland, Western, or Roosevelt. Is there any material difference between those roads and North Ave besides the state route designation?

Ok, I'm not sure I agree, but probably at least Ida B. Wells and Columbus should be primary then? They come directly off the freeways.

Hi, just wanted to comment that I'm visiting Chicago, and as a former resident, I was pretty surprised that Michigan wasn't highway=primary. I've seen that you've led some discussion on the wiki and whatnot, and that there's not necessarily consensus. But I will say that Michigan and Ida Wells definitely "feel" like primary roads to me, based on how similar roads are tagged in other places. Moreover, just going by what's a state/US route feels a bit arbitrary to me, and I don't think it leads to a particularly useful map IMO. The Chicago classification looks a little too "flattened" to me, there's definitely more of a natural hierarchy to the road network than is implied by everything in the central area except North Ave. being a secondary.

Just my two cents, but let me know what you think.

Will

Hi,
Do you have a source for changing this bike path name to match the train line? I've only ever seen it signed/referred to as the "Expo Bike Path", even with the new train line letters being in place for a few months now. This is probably because the bike path still mostly parallels Exposition Blvd., even if the train is not the Expo line anymore. I think this should remain matching existing signage (or maybe expanding the abbreviation to "Exposition Bike Path") unless you have evidence it's been officially changed somewhere.

Best,
Will

Hey,
Thanks. I'm still not sure if Reedley or the NPs are significant enough to warrant a trunk connections, since no other towns of 25k population or National Parks in CA are classified as such. If they are, it seems like the trunk classification should extend all the way to the destination, not just dead end where the construction quality decreases, as the goal is to move away from an entirely road construction-based classification. But on the other hand, given that the freeway is a stub anyway, it's not the most egregious outlier in terms of network connectivity anyway, and I am inclined to defer to your local judgment. So if you'd really rather it stay trunk, we can document that as a case for the urban gray area on the wiki.

Best,
Will

Hi, thanks for being open to discussion, and sorry for the delay in replying. I suppose my question would be, who is taking this road in order for it to be considered a trunk route, that is, one of the main routes in the state's road network? What destinations does it serve that merit this importance? If it connects some of the suburbs to central area, I think that's sufficient, but it looks like it just heads into farmland, near towns like Sanger, and eventually the mountains, which seems more like a highway=primary to me. But I assume you're local (given your username ;)), so you might have some insight into local use patterns that I do not. What the guidelines mostly try to steer away from is just tagging a road as highway=trunk because it has a high speed limit or "expressway" features, instead focusing more on its importance to the network.

Also, one of the principles of the classification scheme is to emphasize connectivity and minimize "spurs" where roads of a certain class don't connect at each end with a road of equal or higher class. This isn't always right, since sometimes roads do decrease in importance gradually as you leave an urban area, and I could see CA 180 being one of those exceptions to some extent. It just seems more likely to me (again, from afar) that this cutoff is somewhat west of Reed Ave., since it looks like it is surrounded by farmland, not residents, from the point the freeway ends. Maybe Academy is more reasonable, though I'm still a bit skeptical it has to be trunk at all.

Let me know what you think!

Best,
Will

Hi, welcome to OpenStreetMap! It looks like you're quite eager to add trees to this park, which is great. However, it seems like you are attaching the trees directly to the highway=footway line, which makes it look like the trees are obstructing the path! It also looks like the tree nodes you're creating don't always correspond to actual trees, though I might be using a different satellite imagery layer than you. Can you clarify your intentions here? Did you mean for these all to be individual trees? Or were they just supposed to represent that the paths were "tree-lined" maybe?

In general, you want to make sure that each node corresponds to a real feature, and that objects only connect when they are connected in reality (like road intersections, or two buildings which touch each other).

Thanks!
Will

Also edited to conform to new terminal at Del Amo Station rather than DT LB

Hi, thanks for going through and adding crosswalks in LA. I was wondering though, what led you to decide to map this crossing across Main St? way/1213079479. I've seen you add this and other "unmarked" crossings across high-speed, multi-lane roads in recent changesets, and I'm worried mapping them as crossings does more harm than good. I'm a pretty confident pedestrian, but I certainly wouldn't feel safe crossing a major road with no crosswalk like here, and I worry that mapping it as a crossing is misleading. When I map crossings, I usually only map "unmarked" crossings across minor roads. You can see what I mean here: osm.org/#map=18/34.04125/-118.43534.

Let me know what you think.

Best,
Will

Hi Eugen,
Thanks for the note. That's interesting that some app processes hiking=yes on ways, if you figure out which it is and how it's used, I'd be interested to know. If the tag is useful information, there's no reason it can't be documented.

Regarding the trail I left a fixme on, thanks for sending that map. I'm quite familiar with this park, I in fact hiked the Rising Sun trail two weeks ago. So I know from on-location survey that there is a path branching off there, even if it does not appear on the map you sent. Even if they're unofficial, I find mapping these paths useful so that hikers aren't caught by surprise when there's a junction on their trail. Hopefully no one is deleting paths just because they don't appear on official maps! (Not saying you are of course ;), some of the other paths you've recently deleted look truly overgrown, or maybe were just bad tiger imports in the first place)

Best,
Will

This particular changeset lists Bing as a source. And from the edit pattern, it doesn't look like an import to me: they've added stop signs, parking=surface tags on existing lots, crosswalks, and marked torn down buildings. What makes you think it is an import, and from where could it possibly have been from? It looks to me much more like a newbie mapper who didn't know they were supposed to save changesets periodically before moving to another area.