[Tagging] Dispute on highway=mini_roundabout

[Andrew Chadwick (lists)]

On 10/05/12 18:31, Josh Doe wrote:
> For those interested, you can download all current nodes
> as a zipped OSM file
> (http://joshd.dev.openstreetmap.org/all_mini_roundabouts_20120510.zip),

A *very* quick look at that against Bing imagery in JOSM reveals a
pretty broad selection of things around the world that get classified as
highway=mini_roundabout:


  * Yer classic blob of paint in the middle of the road. This might the
predominant UK usage, and it's common here, but I'm guesstimating it's
more like 50/50 even in the UK because (and this came as a proper
surprise to me) it's also used for:

  * Small roundabouts/traffic circles with defined centres. Sometimes
with quite large planted trees.

  * Big roundabouts/traffic circles, but fairly rarely; perhaps
predominating in non-English-speaking countries, or countries which have
no concept of size distinctions between their traffic circles?

  * Unmarked passing places, where cars can overtake each other on
narrow roads.

  * Turning circles at the ends of residential roads, with or without
centres.

  * AFAICT, just random intersections without anything specific.

I wonder how it would be possible to get a more systematic analysis of
this data extract. Perhaps a small app which grabs relevant Bing tiles
for nodes at random and asks the user to classify as yes/no/can't tell...?


(But in short the db data sucks and so does the wiki documentation.
Perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is which one to fix
up and how... sigh.)

-- 
Andrew Chadwick