[Tagging] Implied oneway tag for highway=*_link, wiki edits

[Paul Johnson]

Liz wrote:

> and when the comment in the history from 21 June is read it says
> (This won't break any ways, because 1. nobody (approximately) uses this for 
> routing yet, 2. assuming they're 2-way in a routing app is potentially 
> dangerous anyway.)

2 never applies in practice, especially outside California:  Few, if
any, other jurisdictions will give a license to drive to someone who
can't tell the difference between a one-way and a two-way street¹.

> or this comment from 10 November
> (Implicit oneway discourages users from giving definitive tagging. Implicit 
> defaults are also liable to change.)
>
> which is called a "self-fulfilling prophecy" in English.

I tend to prefer to tag explicitly at this point anyway, if only because
there is very little consistency state-to-state in terms of defaults in
reality, and so far all the attention to US tagging has been on a
national level.  This doesn't work:  I can think of at least three
states with reversable freeways (highway=motorway, oneway=no), five
states that allow left turns on red under certain circumstances.  Then
there's things like the implied bicycle=no on highway=motorway, never
mind that this default only works for 15 states (the original colonies
and a couple bonus states in the Sun Belt where people driving while too
old creates a real safety hazard).

> I don't recognise any of the names as being involved in the mailing list.
> I do support some discussion rather than edit wars on the wiki.

Can we get rid of the Talk pages on the wiki (and instead have them
redirect to instructions for subscribing to this list)?  These serve no
purpose except to move the discussion away from the mailing lists, and
I'm not sure anybody but Wikipedia honestly finds Mediawiki's
discussion system particularly practical for keeping everyone on the
same page.



¹  At least this is what one is lead to believe after they've been
involved in three different head-on collisions, all involving
wrong-way Californian-licensed "drivers." They really need to stop
giving the answer key out to drivers taking the test and licensing
drivers who pass the written but fail the driving portion of the
test...