[Tagging] Bridges and layers

[John Smith]

On 27 July 2010 21:05, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> You could invent a tagging scheme that would let you model lanes. You could,
> for example, create a way tagged
>  highway=lane
> or
>  lane=1 [2, 3, ...]
> or some such - certainly needs some thought - maybe qualified with who can
> use it (access=psv ?), and so on, link all the lanes of a road together with
> a relation you also invent, and to the original road as well, which I'm sure
> we'd all prefer you didn't remove!

The problem with doing something like this is, as show by admin
boundary debacles, is this is too brittle and too easily broken by
newbies. Whatever someone comes up with needs to be almost
transparent/hidden from everyone, except those that actually care
about it.

I'd love nothing more than to be able to widen the current ways at
nodes to the width of roads seen from aerial imagery and then be able
to twiddle about with lanes and line them up with actual road markings
etc and being able to tag lanes that can turn and lanes that can't,
yes you could do a plugin in JOSM, but without changes to the API the
first newbie that comes along would break it.

Same goes for 4D editing, and historical maps, historical data would
need to be hidden by the API unless the user specifically requests it.

> That's exactly how the house addressing "Karlsruhe schema" came into being.

It doesn't conflict with anything else, so this isn't quite the same thing.

> You don't need anyone's permission to do this. If you do a good job and
> promote it, it might catch on.

It's not about permission, it's the fact that nothing that anyone has
come up with is substandard and likely to get broken by others...

> As someone said at the conference, it's a do-ocracy - just do it!

Maybe so, but not all of us have the technical ability needed to pull
some of these more advanced concepts off...