[OSM-newbies] Highway Types and Speed Limits

[Pieren]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:57 AM, David ``Smith'' <vidthekid at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Trevor Hook
> Route planning applications aren't likely to know very well what a
> "standard" or "default" speed limit is for a given type of road in a
> given country.

Excepted if you read this wiki page:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_tags_for_routing/Maxspeed

This is about the endless discussion about default values. You cannot
expect that all attributs will be fulfilled for all highways, e.g.
maxspeed, minspeed, averagespeed, width, maxheigh, oneway=no,
maxlength, psv=yes, and so on... Otherwise, each time a new attribut
is created, we will have to add it to millions of ways. What is the
interest to identify residential or urban areas if is is not to set
the default rules attached to such areas ? If you add the default
maxspeed on all your roads, ok why not. You can also add many other
default values. The preset for footway in Potlatch is highway=footway
+ foot=yes. I don't know why motorcar=no is missing... (I hope Richard
will not read this message).

Pieren