ChrisBessert (2022-02-19 02:59:27+00:00): I know you and I haven't seen eye-to-eye in the past and when I looked back to my first OSM edits, you took the time to chastise me, rather scathingly at first before attempting to modify your tone and attempting to have a more reasonable discussion... especially with a newcomer to the platform. Mind you, I'm a GIS Coordinator and professional cartographer who has run the Michigan Highways website for 25 years now with many close friends that work at MDOT or at County Road Commissions. I've made several counties' official road maps. I know mapping, mapping data and transportation networks very well. I needed a little intro to OSM conventions, but I wonder if you've had bad experiences over the years with others because how you come off can be quite acerbic, to be sure! Anyway...

To answer your first question, YES, "OLD 76" is reasonably well posted (as reasonable as can be expected from Road Commissions in northern Michigan) in both Roscommon and Crawford Counties and has been for decades. I've driven it several times to field-check it for my website. Below is a link to a photo of one style of "OLD 76" route marker:

https://ldcre-images-live.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-02/lg-1857-1949676964-f70583ed-7392-49da-9ac2.aeb4e47f781c

Here's a link to the "older style" of white-on-black, square OLD 76 county route maker, this one on OLD 76 heading south out of Roscommon toward St. Helen:

https://goo.gl/maps/jpLkQEU62WqmfpKU7

My understanding is that Roscommon Co has replaced these with the "newer style" gold-on-blue pentagons throughout the county now, however. I hope that answers your question on this point.

As for the business connections issue, I take exception to your assertion there is a "widely-used" tagging format. I've found single business connections in one city referred to in two, three, four or more ways for the one single route. I've also found different business connections for one mainline route (e.g. I-94) coded differently in different cities. There's no reason for this. You, yourself, stated to me several years back that standardization was the most important aspect within OSM, especially when it came to routing applications' use of the data, so as to not not make a motorist believe they needed to use four different routes, when, indeed, it was one single route, just tagged four different ways. Thus, by not only standardizing the business connections along each route and then in general, it provides that consistency along the mainline route and across the state. 

As you're at least partially aware, I'm very well versed in transportation lingo, jargon and database schema structure—it's part of my day-to-day job! So, I figure if I'm willing to use an *incorrect* naming convention within OSM for coding route designations throughout Michigan (e.g. "I 75" instead of "I-75", "US 127" instead of "US-127" and "M 55" instead of "M-55") just because some novice at OSM made an uninformed decision years ago instead of sticking with the official convention which has been in use for over a century (with regard to M-numbered trunklines, at least, and for many decades when it comes to US Highway routes in Michigan), then my standardization for business connections is no less aberrant than that inaccuracy. If I'm doing something "wrong" with business connections, we would also need to change every route designation in Michigan, to start, to their official designations, such as "I-75," "US-127," and "M-55." So, I would say my enforcement of a standardization that was sorely missing across the state and also improving the accuracy within the data is a much greater improvement than worrying about the fact that I'm not using a tagging method that some other person used here and there in a certain percentage of places somewhere else. And since there was such a massively wide variation in the ways business connections had been coded, not only in Michigan, but everywhere in the U.S., there really isn't any "widely-used" tagging format at all. If there were, why did I found such a wide variation everywhere?

In the end, OSM tends to often be a wild mash-up dumpster fire of "Oooh! I can edit a map and I think the road in my neighborhood I drive on is a MAJOR road and I wanna tag it as such!" even though it's County Local Road and classified by the state transportation authorities with a Functional Classification Code (FCC) of A32 is in no way anything more than a "Residential Road" in OSM parlance. The amount of roads which drastically diverge from their real-world classifications in OSM is scary. THESE are some of the huge issues which need to be attended to, IMHO. I'm sorry my business connection standards don't agree with your point-of-view... but at least I'm consistently *using* a standard, and one based on solid transportation planning principles.

Please let me reassure you that I don't make these edits in a vacuum, nor do I make edits simply for fun or without considering them in the bigger picture. OSM may not be perfect in the areas I've edited it, but it's vastly improved and a lot more standardized than it was before I was there, and I feel that's better than leaving the utter crap that was there instead...