[OSM-talk] [RFC] highway=unclassified currently is too ambiguous, so here's my proposal to fix it.

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Aug 5 08:43:04 BST 2009


Hi,

John Smith wrote:
> I'm proposing not to replace highway=unclassified but to clarify it's
> meaning to be one thing, that is it has higher volumes of traffic
> than residential, but not enough to be considered tertiary.

This is not how it is generally used over here (Germany) where the 
majority of people use unclassified for a road roughly equal to 
residential but without people living there.

Mind you, only recently someone has suggested on talk-de to do the same 
as you say, namely define unclassified as something "bigger than 
residential but smaller than tertiary".

> I'm also proposing to introduce a new highway classification for
> non-urban* areas. That is highway=rural would be for roads generally
> lesser than residential, generally unsealed but some of them are
> sealed and they generally only have a single lane depending how
> zealous the grader driver was feeling.

I would not hesitate to use highway=residential or highway=unclassified 
for these (or even tertiary and up if they are important to traffic). In 
fact, nobody says that a secondary road must be sealed! You can always 
add a surface tag to describe details.

Bye
Frederik





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