[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - lanes General Extension

[Tobias Knerr]

Martin Vonwald wrote:
> The proposal http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/lanes_General_Extension
> is now open for voting.

Is voting on this really helpful right now? I believe that nobody can 
honestly know at this point whether the proposal's idea is actually 
good, whether it needs minor corrections, or whether we maybe even 
should try something completely different.

Personally, I consider it most likely that the general idea is the right 
way to go, but that minor modifications would still improve it. However, 
I cannot tell with any certainty before I had the opportunity to gather 
some experience with it.

For example, I'm currently experimenting with lane rendering in 
OSM2World. The experiences so far have confirmed some of my 
previously-held assumptions about the usefulness of certain lane tagging 
schemes, and made me question others.¹ Similarly, I expect that actually 
trying to apply a tagging scheme to large parts of my town would also 
result in some practical insight into what works and what doesn't. But 
that, again, takes time.

So I cannot vote for or against this proposal today because I couldn't 
make a sufficiently informed decision. The vote might give some insight 
into how mappers think about value-sequence based lane tagging, but 
probably not much about this specific variant thereof - so no matter 
what the result of this vote will be, I will not consider myself bound 
by it. Hopefully, others will think the same way, and remain open for 
better solutions if they come up in the future.

Tobias

¹ I found it very helpful for my use case to have the road's lanes split 
into a "left" and a "right" part. I also relied on the assumption that I 
would be able to clearly determine a lane's "type" (e.g. sidewalk, cycle 
lane, parking lane, bus lane, ...) somehow.