[Tagging] lanes tag dispute

[Nathan Edgars II]

On 9/18/2011 2:19 PM, Toby Murray wrote:
> My take on lanes is that it should be the number of continuous lanes
> along a road. This impacts traffic flow and road capacity which allows
> routers to make more informed decisions. Turning lanes don't increase
> overall road capacity. Rather, they prevent it from dropping at busy
> intersections. As such, I do not split and tag ways where turning
> lanes are. I could see turning lanes being useful information though
> but lumping them in with the total lane count actually obscures
> information. I would rather see them tagged with lanes:turning:left=1
> or something like that. That way you know exactly what is happening
> and routers could easily say "get in the left turning lane.

This is pretty much my view too. The one application where I can see the 
total number of lanes being important is for a pedestrian crossing the 
road, and here it would probably work better as a tag on the crossing 
node. (And what really matters isn't the number of lanes but the width, 
AKA the length of the crossing.)