Changeset: 151163230
Retagged roads based on connectivity and importance; added traffic signals
Closed by Joseph R P
Tags
changesets_count | 25825 |
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created_by | iD 2.29.0 |
host | https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit |
imagery_used | Bing Maps Aerial;National Agriculture Imagery Program |
locale | en-US |
warnings:crossing_ways:highway-waterway | 1 |
warnings:mismatched_geometry:area_as_line | 1 |
Discussion
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
How are you assessing importance?
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Comment from Joseph R P
Simply based on how the roads serve relative to other nearby roads and how they were initially tagged. There were little to no secondary roads in this area, so I applied that classification to the (now formerly) tertiary routes that provided more access to commercial areas and major roadways than typical tertiary collector roads do.
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
Some of these changes are reasonable, but I think the majority should be reverted, because the result is incoherent and unrecognizable. It looks good on a map but doesn’t reflect reality very well. Your expectation of secondary roads in this area may be based on traffic or development patterns found elsewhere but not here.
Most of the tertiary roads you reclassified are no more important for access than the other tertiary roads you didn’t reclassify, like East Kemper, Snider, and Pfeiffer. If you reclassify those roads too, there are few if any tertiary roads left. Meanwhile there’s no distinction left between these roads and others like Reed Hartman, Fields Ertel, and Tylersville that are more important for getting across this part of town.
In southwestern Ohio, the level of government that maintains a particular road is a good predictor of the road’s service area and importance to the transportation network. Our starting point has been that state, county, and township/municipal roads should occupy distinct classifications. You can therefore make out some patterns, like the section line roads in Butler County and the destination-named roads in Clermont County.
There are occasional exceptions. For promoting or demoting these individual roads, I suggest consulting an AADT map as a gut check. Otherwise, I think you should adjust your expectations to allow for more variability from metro area to metro area.
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Comment from Joseph R P
Which particular roads would you say are overclassified here?
I think shorter arterial roads that provide connections between major highways or high-traffic areas like commercial zones can be just as vital as major thoroughfares that stretch across the metro in their own regards. I also think it makes sense for some roads with lower traffic counts to be classified higher than some roads with higher traffic counts depending on the scenario. For example, Route 42 in this area is an objectively more important route than Snider Road through Mason is, but it sees less traffic than it. US 42 spans the northeastern Cincinnati area connecting multiple suburbs/towns in the area to each other while Snider mainly serves to connect other tertiary and secondary roads and the residential and industrial areas along it. I think Kemper, Snider, and Pfeiffer could be bumped up to secondary and Tylersville between I 75 and US 42 bumped up to primary. Looking back on my changes though, Butler-Warren Road is the only road which may have been overclassified in my opinion.
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
“Which particular roads would you say are overclassified here?”
I am not saying a particular road is overclassified. I’m saying you’re promoting roads haphazardly and inconsistently, resulting in a loss of information. Local consistency is more important than getting a random selection of streets right by a personal impression. I’ll try to give you some context because I hope you’ll at least stick around long enough to finish the job. In fairness, changeset 148744892 turned out better, so I’m struggling to understand what went wrong here.
In Ohio, by design, state-maintained roads numbered under 100 generally run along principal arterial roads, although some segments of these routes have been bypassed. Three-digit state routes are supposed to be less important, but this system has fallen apart in the Cincinnati area because ODOT ran out of two-digit numbers. U.S. 42 and U.S. 22 are obvious primary roads. (They would even be trunk roads, but they’ve been bypassed by the Interstates.)
Butler, central Hamilton, and western Warren counties have laid out a grid of collector streets along section lines. In the remaining areas, the counties have laid out collector streets in more haphazard fashion, often naming each street after its endpoints. These county roads are generally useful for travel across a township, but not across the county.
However, a select few county roads are maintained as crosstown connections, such as Tylersville, Fields Ertel, East Kemper (east of Montgomery), and Glendale Milford (ditto). Similarly, Reed Hartman is a high-capacity traffic reliever for I-71. These arterial roads need to be classified higher than collector streets, but lower than the state-maintained intercity roads.
It makes sense to classify these crosstown roads similarly to the three-digit state routes, which have a similarly sized service area. Note that service area does not always correspond to length. Lebanon/Columbia may appear to form a “crosstown” connection between Loveland and Mason, but that’s a relatively unimportant connection.
I have just described three classification values lower than trunk. You can decide what to call these three values, and then help me update https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ohio/Map_features#Road_classifications
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Comment from Joseph R P
Despite what my edits come across as, they weren't implemented haphazardly as I had identified the places and other roads they'd the roads I worked on would connect to and looked at AADT data, rather than going in and changing roads based on first impressions. You could say I half-assed upgrading the roads under the regard that I only upgraded some of the roads and left some other nearby ones untouched, but it's a gradual process which I've been making across the area which I had previously done with around Hamilton, Middletown, Forest Park, and closer to the downtown area of Cincinnati.
Regarding the road classification hierarchy, major intercity roads regardless of who maintains them are better candidates for being upgraded to trunk if their purpose is to connect other cities. The way I see it collector roads should be tertiary, major collectors/minor arterials should be secondary, and major arterials should be primary. In my opinion, however, this should be regardless of how the road is signed or maintained, what the functional classification is, etc., because that ultimately isn't always consistent with how roads are used for travelling.
For the most part, I understand the road hierarchy, but I'm also not understanding whether I should revert this back to how it was before like you mentioned in the first comment or "stick around to finish the job" by continuing to work upon it and upgrade the now under-classified roads.
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
I suggested reverting and trying again, not just returning to the status quo. But if you’d rather finish the job, then you’d upgrade the rest of the tertiary roads to secondary, for consistency with the ones you’ve already upgraded. Unfortunately, you’ll have buried the important crosstown routes among the more local highway feeders, and we’d have fewer tertiary roads left.
Indeed, the level of government doesn’t necessarily guarantee a certain level of importance. But the designated routes are a useful starting point that you seem to be ignoring. Maybe that’s because of the situation in other states that you’re more familiar with? Multiple times you’ve claimed to consider “how roads are used for traveling”. How do you know? Is it possible that you guessed, and that you guessed wrong, as you did in downtown Cincinnati in 2022? [1]
Here are some specific examples of changes I would expect to see. If you disagree, please explain why:
* Lebanon/Columbia should be the same classification as adjoining segments of West Loveland, McKinney, East Kemper, etc. My name is all over this road in Mapillary, but this is a contrived route with plenty of alternatives.
* Camargo and Loveland Madeira south of Remington should be lower than Remington. This is a scenic route, albeit one that sometimes gets overrun by overflow from I-71 and Montgomery.
* Reed Hartman should be higher than most of the other roads we’ve discussed. It’s a traffic reliever for I-71, an almost unique role in the region.
* Snider should be the same as Cox and lower than Tylersville, Mason Montgomery, and Fields Ertel. The traffic counts on these streets aren’t even close.
* Terra Firma Drive should be unclassified. It’s just an access road for a couple of strip malls.
* Bridle Creek/Stillpass should be residential. Not every through street is a collector road. These are unstriped, have kids playing in them [2], and stop for other residential streets.
These changes imply other changes, but we can start here. I can make these changes myself if you prefer, but you know my inclination will be to address these discrepancies by demoting rather than promoting.
[1] https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C7Q912JDT/p1651888896479239
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/11938871750 -
Comment from Joseph R P
Like I implied, I didn't "guess" the importance of the roads. It's pretty clear to see how a road is used based on its traffic data when put up against other nearby roads, with consideration for the context of which area they're and where they go. The edits I made in downtown Cincinnati a couple years back were primarily based on roads being signed as US Routes and Interstate Alt. routes. I've changed my stance to be less so oriented on how a road is signed but rather its actual importance if you take away those factors.
I disagree that Loveland-Madeira/Camargo and Columbia/Lebanon should be the same classification as McKinney and Loveland west of Lebanon. The former are more important in the sense that they are longer, straighter, and busier roads with more development along them and they form a direct connection from Loveland to the nearby Interstates and US 22. I would compare them less with mostly-residential collector roads and more to a highway like Route 48 which also links Loveland to the nearby highways, just in the other direction. I could see Kemper Road west of 22 making sense as a secondary route given its similar characteristics and AADT compared to Fields Ertel Road, but I'm on the fence about upgrading it to secondary east of that, as while it still provides somewhat of a through route there, it's not as direct or as developed as the current secondary roads that go in/out of Loveland and there are better, more direct routes from Loveland to Cincinnati and Mason. Loveland-Madeira/Camargo also links the area down to Madeira and Mariemont. I of course don't believe every single road that links every single suburban town to each other should be upgraded to secondary but this is a comparatively major route to the other nearby tertiary routes which do not serve as direct connections between other towns/commercial areas.
I think secondary for a road like Reed Hartman while relatively minor roads like Lebanon Road are also being tagged as secondary is perfectly fine. The only instance where roads like Reed Hartman are viable alternatives to mainline Interstates are when those Interstates are backed up, which is a very frequent scenario but not a constant one. In regular traffic, I 71 ALT serves as a typical arterial road, connecting other secondary routes to the Interstates, albeit one built with expressway characteristics and instead of retail areas, residential neighborhoods, schools, etc., it's office/industrial parks. Furthermore, unlike US 22 and 42, it does not leave the metro or connect to any downtowns of any sort. However, if it were directly adjacent to a road like Lebanon Road, I would either upgrade Reed Hartman Highway to primary or downgrade Lebanon Road to tertiary, but since these two roads are in different sections of the metro that see widely varying traffic volumes altogether, I don't see any particular issues with the two being classified the same.
Snider Road could be upgraded to secondary. It does parallel multiple other secondary routes but a scenario like this is bound to occur in such an unorganized semi-grid layout like the Cincinnati metro's is. Upgrading Tylersville Road between I 75 and US 42, Mason Montgomery Road from US 42 to I 71, and Field Ertel Road from there to US 22 forms a network of major arterial roads that are just important as US 42 and US 22. A highway like US 42 may hold more priority as it's an intercity route which leaves the metro, but that's really only when it actually exits the metro, and while it parallels I 71 through Cincinnati and Mason, it is mostly just a busy commercialized thoroughfare and links other major highways and suburban cities areas just like the other three aforementioned roads do.
Streets like Terra Firma and Stillpass are in a position where they are definitely more important than typical residential roads but not exactly as much as a tertiary route. I'd say it makes sense to revert them to their original classifications, as there isn't really a way to imply that these roads are still relatively busy through streets that connect other major through streets.
Feel free to do whatever you want to my edits, I don't own them and can't control them, but I'd rather work with what I've begun than start over.
- Camargo Road (1281822349), v1
- Gallaher Street (1281822350), v1
- Stillpass Way (18981376), v16
- Gallaher Street (18981495), v14
- Bridle Creek Drive (18985124), v16
- Mason Avenue (18986164), v15
- Bethany Road (18986829), v20
- West Chester Road (18987149), v33
- West Chester Road (18987154), v15
- West Loveland Avenue (19023848), v29
- 19051681, v13
- Loveland Madeira Road (19054271), v14
- Loveland Madeira Road (19054281), v32
- North Lebanon Road (19054855), v23
- Camargo Pike (19057123), v6
- Miami Road (19057363), v8
- Miami Road (19057366), v18
- Miami Road (19057372), v19
- Miami Avenue (19062193), v18
- Miami Avenue (19062195), v16
Relations (1)
Nodes (7)
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