Closed mihaii-telenav closed 6 years ago
It looks like the wiki is merely trying to say that when a link has a ref, it is the ref of the route it carries, and not an exit number. Similarly, tagging a link with the name of the exit is not the right place for it. It's almost paradoxical for a link to have a name — the named road would continue as a regular highway.
Based on looking at some data (in the US), named links are either a mistake (an attempt to name the junction) or a judgment call as to what's a link and what's the road proper, which is mostly correct but could conceivably be tidied up a bit. Ref'd links are usually correct.
To me this looks exactly the same as "refs on highways" — they should be replaced by route relations, but that's not happening anytime soon.
We've received quite a number of replies on the mailing list, but we couldn't draw a clear conclusion based on this. From now on, we will approach these situations as follows:
If community members from a certain city complain about this approach, we will follow the local rules regarding this topic.
During our editing process, we encounter various situations where ref tags are present on links.
Looking at the motorway_link OSM wiki:
So the ref tag is accepted and recommended to be used.
On the other hand, the general highway link OSM wiki says that very few link roads have on them route refs:
Below are a couple of examples with link roads that have refs:
way 60178013 @ 42.251034, -88.146945
way 15191231 @ 29.7018493, -98.0962244
way 14987288 @ 35.3846081, -97.0879561
way 180527913 @ 35.0158628, -106.0694184
All of the above links are included in a route relation, which have the ref tag included in the relation.
So, what's the general consensus regarding this topic? Should the ref= tag be added on the links? Should it be removed when encountering such a situation if the link is in a route relation that already has the ref= tag in it?