Ohio county routes

[Minh Nguyễn]

A number of Ohio counties have signed county routes. We’ve been tagging them with network=US:OH:xxx, where xxx is a three-letter ODOT county code. [1]

Only a few of us have been adding relations to county routes in Ohio, so if using the three-letter codes would complicate things for you, I’m sure we could switch to spelling the names out.

The bigger complication is that county route shields are pretty inconsistent in Ohio. Most counties don’t use county route shields at all; for those that do, there are at least four styles:

Gold-on-blue pentagon from Ohio MUTCD: Jefferson (JEF), Mahoning (MAH) [2][3], Ottawa (OTT)
Black-on-white square from Ohio MUTCD: Harrison (HAS), Logan (LOG) [4], Mahoning (MAH) [5]
White-on-green square: Belmont (BEL) [6], Williams (WIL) [7]
Black-on-yellow square: Trumbull (TRU) [8]

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ohio#Counties
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/4103935186/in/set-72157622802728746
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/sets/72157622802721246/
[4] http://www.peakofohio.com/news/details.cfm?clientid=5&id=9090
[5] http://www.aaroads.com/midwest/i-080ed_oh.html
[6] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Diagrams_of_Ohio_county_route_markers
[7] http://www.aaroads.com/shields/show.php?image=OH19900221&view=5
[8] http://www.aaroads.com/midwest/ohio/trumbull_county_rd_329_vienna.jpg

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

This site has photographs of 40 Ohio counties’ shield designs: http://fortetwo.net/ . Since they all fall in the category of simple text and geometric shapes (or unoriginal county shapes), I suppose one could use it as a source when creating public domain SVG art.

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

A much better collection: http://www.angelfire.com/oh5/countysigns/ .

[Phil! Gold (asciiphil)]

Other states (In particular, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York) seem to have settled on using the full name of the county in the network tag, so using that rather than the abbreviations would be more consistent with existing usage.

I've got templates for the yellow-on-blue pentagon and the black-on-white square styles already. The white-on-green square and black-on-yellow square styles seem like they're just color variants of the black-on-white square, so those shouldn't be too hard to do. There seem to be several counties that only put route numbers on street name signs. I'd be inclined to just not render shields for such routes (much like Pennsylvania's quadrant routes, which don't really have dedicated signage). Does that seem like a reasonable decision?

Are there counties for which you know roughly the range of route numbers? I can infer ranges from the data already entered, but if you know the exact range for a county, I can prepare all of its shields ahead of time rather than waiting for someone to enter the data (and then for me to notice it).

[Phil! Gold (asciiphil)]

Oh, yeah. I don't think I could reproduce Ashland County's signs in a way that would be at all readable. I'll see what I can do in the way of modifications to make it legible at small sizes. At worst, I suppose I could make a green-on-white square style for them.

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

> Other states (In particular, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York) seem to have settled on using the full name of the county in the network tag, so using that rather than the abbreviations would be more consistent with existing usage.

OK, I’ll bring up the tagging convention with other Ohio mappers who’ve been adding relations. The abbreviations are fairly entrenched in Ohio because ODOT uses them so consistently.

> I'd be inclined to just not render shields for such routes (much like Pennsylvania's quadrant routes, which don't really have dedicated signage). Does that seem like a reasonable decision?

Right, it doesn’t make any sense to create shields for counties that don’t use dedicated shields.

Several of the examples at the sites I linked to are actually mile markers with the route number at the top. I’m on the fence as to whether a map should render shields based on them (omitting the distance). On the one hand, you’ll have to take liberties with some of the designs. On the other, eventually I’d like to tackle rendering shields for other countries, like Vietnam, where milestones are used instead of reassurance signs, so there’s no other choice.

> Are there counties for which you know roughly the range of route numbers?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good idea about ranges, except that parts of northwestern Ohio, like much of Indiana, have very consistent section/township road grids numbered systematically. For Hamilton (HAM), which only signs routes on little sticks in the ground (probably not of interest to you), there’s a comprehensive list of county road numbers at http://www.hamilton-co.org/engineer/roadlist.pdf .

For a superset of the counties that actually sign their routes, the TIGER 2005 data (and thus OSM) has probably all the route numbers hidden away in non-standard name_* tags. An Overpass API query like the following should be able to find all of them:

http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=(way[name~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"]; way[name_1~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"]; way[name_2~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"]; way[name_3~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"]; way[alt_name~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"]; way[loc_name~"^(County|Belmont) .*[0-9]"]["tiger:county"="Belmont, OH"];);out;

> Oh, yeah. I don't think I could reproduce Ashland County's signs in a way that would be at all readable.

Ashland County’s design might be more readable if you took just the county outline, widened it a bit, and centered the text vertically.

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

I’ve created templates for Scioto (SCI) and Trumbull (TRU) Counties’ shields at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Diagrams_of_Ohio_county_route_markers . Interestingly, Trumbull *County* road shields display both the county and township.

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

I’ve compiled a table of Ohio county, township, and city route networks at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ohio/Route_relations/Networks . Each shield links to an SVG template on Wikimedia Commons. Rather than spam this bug with each county’s ranges, I’ll eventually list all the ranges on that page.

[Phil! Gold (asciiphil)]

That's, frankly, awesome and I'll start working with these.

Some questions:

I assume that Trumbull County routes cross township boundaries and each township just puts their name on the route signs within that township. Is that correct? If so, I'll just drop the township portion of the image when generating shields.

Some counties appear to have a separator between the letter and number on their signs. (Auglaize, but also, it appears, Shelby and Wayne.) Is that separator part of how the number is written (and, more importantly to me, is it part of the ref= tag you're using)? If it's not part of the ref= tag but it should be on the sign, that makes things tricky (but doable; I've managed similar things for other states).

There's only one entry in the "Ranges" column at the moment, for Fremont. Is it safe to assume that any ranges mentioned are complete unless otherwise indicated?

I'm guessing that there are a number of signed township routes in Ashland County. Is each township route number unique within the county? If so, perhaps you could tag all of them with a network of US:OH:ASD:TWP. This would be analogous to New Jersey, which has one set of county routes whose numbers are unique across the state and are tagged US:NJ:CR while routes whose numbers are only unique within a particular county are tagged US:NJ:<county-name>.

Also, not a comment, but I'm going to leave Ashland County for last. I still don't know how I'm going to make those shields look good on the map.

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

That seems to be what Trumbull County is doing. [1] I’ve been putting the township names in the `modifier` key, but perhaps `is_in:township` would be better. Either way, I think it’s reasonable to simply these shields as much as possible and not worry about reproducing the shields exactly. After all, there’s no way to make “South Bloomfield” legible (except at z=19). And it’d be much easier to standardize on one green shield and one white shield rather than worry about minor font and layout differences.

For Auglaize County, I’ll make sure to put the hyphen in. In making the shields for Shelby and Wayne, I had to manually position a separate text box with a smaller font for the dash. The hyphen in those counties seems like an afterthought, and I’d just leave it out.

Fremont’s ranges are complete. (They’re just old alignments of state and U.S. routes.) I’ll put an ellipsis in if I have an incomplete set of ranges. I’m still having a hard time figuring out ranges for the southeastern counties, but I’ll have ranges for the northwestern ones shortly. A caveat about the northwestern counties is that, although their routes are laid out along a neat grid, there are some fractional exceptions like 22.75. [2]

I haven’t seen many examples of Ashland County township routes, but it *seems* like many counties have one set of township route numbers. The only reason to distinguish them as separate networks is that township routes may be signed by one township but not the next, or they’ll have different styles (green vs. white, or “Township” vs. “Twp.”). For Ashland County, I’ll put the routes under :TWP unless I notice any overlap.

[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Diagrams_of_route_markers_of_Trumbull_County,_Ohio
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Williams_County_Route_22.75_OH.svg

[Phil! Gold (asciiphil)]

I'm adding some things in; take a look around http://elrond.aperiodic.net/shields/?lat=40.27404&lon=-83.70813&zoom=14 .

[Minh Nguyễn (mxn)]

That’s awesome!

Another reason for maintaining explicit township networks, rather than :TWP, is that a township road at a township line will often have one township’s signage on one side and the other township’s on the other side. Some counties avoid this situation by maintaining county routes along township lines, but Logan County for instance doesn’t necessarily do that. I’m using forward/reverse relation roles in those cases.

Now the Web will know just how confusing rural Ohio’s roads can be – so they can plan ahead, of course. :-)

[Phil! Gold (asciiphil)]

Oh, if different townships have different signs, I certainly agree that they should have different network tags. I was just suggesting :TWP For Ashland County township routes, since it looks like the signs are the same for every township in the county. (And if you and the other Ohio mappers do settle on individual township network tags in Ashland County, just make sure they're documented and I'll work with your data.)

I'll keep checking the wiki page for updates as I work through the counties it documents. If you hit a point where you've got all of the counties that have dedicated signs for their routes documented, please note it here; I'll close this issue when it looks like I've handled all of the relevant counties in Ohio.