[HOT] residential roads within built-up areas

Vao Matua vaomatua at gmail.com
Wed Jul 26 18:04:00 UTC 2017


At State of the Map Africa conference earlier this month we had several
discussions about road tagging.

The Africa Highway Tagging Guide
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa> has been updated to
reflect those discussions.

Personally I have found that thinking of the tagging hierarchy "upside
down" makes more sense than starting with the "important" roads then
proceeding down to roads of "lesser importance".
Numbers-wise there are more paths and residential roads than any other.
The most important transportation route for an individual is the one that
leads from their home to the village or town.  It could be a path or
residential road which would lead to highway=unclassified or
highway=tertiary.

One question that is useful to ask about the function of the road is "does
it provide a *collector *function?", does the road get used to help people
from various nearby locations get to a single place such as a hamlet,
village, or town? if the route provides access between settlements then the
road is highway=unclassified or highway=tertiary +.

One of the things that is confusing about the OSM tagging is that it is a
mix of function and construction. A motorway and primary highway may have
the same function, but different construction class. In the same way a path
may be a significant transportation route for a village or small town but
it cannot be highway=unclassified or highway=tertiary because of the
construction class that limits vehicles.

One of the things that was confusing for me when I started tagging OSM
roads was the highway=track tag.  A track as defined in OSM is not a
construction class lower than unclassified or residential.  It is a
drive-able route used to access agriculture or forestry areas without a
connection function between settlements. A track can also be found in a
park or game preserve, but should not be used for a road with a through
connection.

My opinion on highway=service is the same as Blake's, a road inside a
restricted access location (gated community or industrial facility)
wouldn't have the same function as a road with similar construction but
with public access.

Regards,

Emmor
(Palolo)

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Blake Girardot <bgirardot at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 2:39 PM, Bjoern Hassler <bjohas+mw at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I agree with your definition. Would you agree that it implies that
> > 'residential' is used relatively sparsely, i.e. where a road leads to a
> > group of houses, or where a road is located inside a "gated" are, like an
> > institution, university, school or residential community?
>
> If the road is for access to housing and not much else (i.e.,
> connecting settlements or major roads inside of settlements) I use
> residential.
>
> Roads in institutions or large commercial facilities I would probably
> map as highway=service, but I am not sure that is a typical usage of
> it, but to me they seem like basically private driveways, just really
> long and complicated driveways. I would feel strange mapping them as
> residential.
>
> Cheers
> Blake
>
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