[OSM-newbies] What to do about alleys?

[Richard Weait]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 3:27 AM, G H S <tiosancho at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>The wiki suggests to use highway=service and name as appropriate
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dservice
>
> Why is everything tagged as "highway", and then often combined with types
> that aren't highways at all?  I would have expected something like "road="
> followed by things like "highway", "alley", "residential", whatever.

"Highway" is an old word for any publicly maintained route or passage.
 In North America and some other places we use highway as a synonym
for freeway or motorway.  Early on in the history of OpenStreetMap the
word highway was chosen as the word that includes all categories of,
um, er, well, highways. ;-)

HIGHWAY. A passage or road through the country, or some parts of it, for the
use of the people. 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 442. The term highway is said to be a
generic name for all kinds of public ways. 6 Mod R, 255.
	-- From Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)