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There seems to have been a certain number of edit wars over the classification of various major bridges in New York City. One of the main criteria for what is a Another important factor is that I'm hoping we can come up with a reasonable set of criteria for what In the below table I've catalogued some area bridges with varying characteristics. The Carries column gives the street the bridge was built to carry, and its classification. The
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In a conflict, particularly with primary, trunk and motorway tagging, I strongly recommend giving consideration to the lower value in the range that people are talking about. I don't believe every Interstate segment qualifies for motorway, though one-off and extremely extenuating circumstances can give an exception (like the traffic light for the Interstate Drawbridge on I 5). However, I don't think all of I 5 should be a motorway; north of Blaine City Center in Washington and south of I 8 in California is a pretty good case for a trunk since it's basically a freeway but there's pedestrians at both ends and on the Canadian end there's also a bicycle lane that moves from the right to the left side of the roadway, multiple traffic lights, at grade intersections and a big park with people often playing frisbee over the roadway. I've got zero experience with the bridges in question, though. But there really should be a hesitancy to tag things as motorway when they don't operate like one. Often Trunk or Primary is a better value even if their network or official classification is higher. |
Just for info - you can link to how these objects have changed over time by linking to (for one lane of the Williamsburg Bridge for example) http://osm.mapki.com/history/way.php?id=40337615 .
@SomeoneElse thanks, I've added those links to the last column of the table.
It's troublesome because there are no legal designation, unlike the origin in UK Motorway. This is more suitable for discussion in forum and elsewhere, than an Q&A format.
You should mention the end connections as well. For example, the Triborough Bridge can be considered as a natural extension of I-278 connecting with FDR Drive, which would strongly be
=motorway.Personally, you should term the "limited-access" as restricted vehicle categories directly. Fundamentally, bridges usually have no driveways, making them "limited-access" already.
For many years, the vehicular ways of the Brooklyn Bridge were tagged as motorway, and those on the Manhattan Bridge as primary. In 2018 the Manhattan was upgraded to motorway to match the Brooklyn. This doesn't seem too offbase, since these two bridges are reasonably similar in nature.
Last year the infamous Fluffy89502 changed them both to primary as part of a large brutal re-classification campaign. That's certainly too minor a class, but I felt Fluffy did have a point that motorway was perhaps overselling them a bit. So I settled on trunk for both of them, based on the wiki's description of "limited access but not high speed."
I haven't given much attention to the other bridges or tunnels, but offhand I doubt that there is a single classification that would accurately describe all the bridges into Manhattan, since some of them directly connect to expressways and some connect surface streets.
That really is quite a nice table.
After a bit of staring at the table, the map, and aerial imagery, I've begun to feel that perhaps the non-GWB Washington Bridge, the Williamsburg, and the Queensboro should be demoted to trunk. (Maybe even the Lincoln Tunnel and all of NJ-495, but I guess that's another topic.)
It would be working backwards of course, but I could invent a formula based on this table that would support that demotion. The simplest might to be to tally one point for every motorway link, plus one point for "vehicles only." A score < 5 means the bridge keeps the classification of the "carries" street, 5-8 merits trunk, and > 8 merits motorway. (Obviously this formula is almost completely arbitrary.)
I don't think any such formula should be binding, but it's interesting to take a look at the outliers.
Thanks @Kovoschiz. I've changed that column name. I've also sent this to the
taggingmailing list now, which is maybe a better place to discuss it.