Rename Motorway Junction / Exit to Highway Exit

1ec5 commented 1 year ago

Problem

Over the years, I’ve come across many instances of mappers in the U.S. incorrectly tagging highway=motorway_junction on the node at the beginning or end of a freeway on-ramp (highway=motorway_link leading toward a highway=motorway), for example:

or nowhere near a motorway-like road:

Diagnosis

I suspect a major factor is that the highway=motorway_junction preset has the name “Motorway Junction / Exit” in American English. Assuming the user has figured out that “motorway” refers to a freeway and not a raceway, they might think this double-barreled name intentionally covers both freeway entrances and freeway exits. That seems to be the case in the examples I’ve come across.

What’s more, “junction” is not a normal word for a freeway off-ramp here; it normally refers to any kind of connection between two major roads or routes, whether a giant cloverleaf or a simple four-way stop intersection.

A “junction” where the surface street connects to the freeway.

A “junction” at a signalized intersection between two surface streets.

A freeway entrance.

Originally, the preset was named simply “Motorway Junction”, after the tag name: openstreetmap/iD@4d237c6760f1c0bd267233344473fb3033674052. openstreetmap/iD@1f2420e5994c22c6c1fa0a5c006dbf0f819ecccc added “Exit” for discoverability, but I don’t think it does enough to dispel the intuition that the preset also covers freeway and expressway entrances.

Proposal

I think we should rename the preset to “Highway Exit” in the development language (American English), while making sure that Commonwealth English localizations retain “Motorway Junction”.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/blob/43e30d235b9a16db8e62bcc1b5aaca3835d31c19/data/presets/highway/motorway_junction.json#L16

I think “Highway Exit” is the most appropriate term for this feature in American English, possibly the only phrase that would work across the country. These exits are not necessarily limited to freeways; they are also characteristic of expressways (expressway=yes). Yet there is no single word for a freeway and no single word for an expressway that is well-understood by laypeople across the country. “Freeway” and “expressway” come the closest, but they are only well-understood in the west and potentially confusing in the east. “Highway” is general enough to skirt this issue.

/ref https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/pull/874#discussion_r1170375397

tyrasd commented 1 year ago

The change to Highway Exit seems reasonable to me. :+1:

One potential downside might be that translators could confuse the term Highway with the OSM highway tag and potentially translating it into something that has a broader meaning than the preset should actually convey. But I hope that translators actually look at the developer notes in transifex, which clearly states which tag this should be for. So it should be fine.

Additionally, we should also add freeway exit and expressway exit as search terms of the preset, right?

1ec5 commented 1 year ago

One potential downside might be that translators could confuse the term Highway with the OSM highway tag and potentially translating it into something that has a broader meaning than the preset should actually convey. But I hope that translators actually look at the developer notes in transifex, which clearly states which tag this should be for. So it should be fine.

Also, in case a translator does translate it literally, as “road” or “way”, hopefully the user would understand that residential streets and footways don’t have “exits”.

Additionally, we should also add freeway exit and expressway exit as search terms of the preset, right?

Yes.

openstreetmap / id-tagging-schema