Comment 5 for bug 1025086

> 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.