[Tagging] Dispute prevention: meaning of lanes tag

[Ilpo Järvinen]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, Martin Vonwald (Imagic) wrote:

> Am 21.04.2012 um 13:34 schrieb "Ilpo Järvinen" <ilpo.jarvinen at helsinki.fi>:
> 
> > ...What I don't really care if it is called lanes=1.5 or 
> > lanes=1/2+some_other_agreed_tag_which_is_not_an_estimated_width=x, but 
> > simply saying that use lanes=1/2 alone instead I oppose.
> 
> I would recommend lanes=2 and width=xxx. Maybe give some examples for 
> the widths of some common, "narrow" roads? Can someone provide photos 
> and widths?

!?! ...No! Unfortunately this was exactly what I oppose! Because:

It actually requires a) knowing/estimating and b) storing the width number 
somewhere until you can put that to the particular osm way. Both a) and b) 
make it significantly harder to collect compared with something as simple 
as lanes=1.5 which requires only 1-bit of storage in your memory.

I don't mind if we _eventually_ have width too but I think there needs to 
be some intermediate step in between those to balance ease of collecting 
and time-consuming accuracy, which is probably the reason we have 
lanes=1.5 tags in the db in the first place. ...It highlights there's 
a clear need for this kind of tradeoff (but no assigned tag for it exists 
other than reusing lanes= but that part could be IMHO easily fixed but 
that won't happen as long as width is offered as sole alternative :-().

-- 
 i.