[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - trafficability

Gerald Weber gweberbh at gmail.com
Wed Jan 15 14:44:56 UTC 2014


On 15 January 2014 00:39, Bryce Nesbitt <bryce2 at obviously.com> wrote:

> The tag as proposed leaves much to interpretations.  But there are a bunch
> of things one can say about a road that are crisp and clear:
>
> covered_at_high_tide
> not_plowed_in_winter
> not_maintained_by_government
> passing_requires_reversing
>
> But at some point you break down into prose and write note='Road
> maintained by local 4WD club, passes over sandy inlet that floods at high
> tide, four inch rocks placed by club restrict access to high clearance
> vehicles, see website for details.'
>
>
These valid comments make me think that we may be approaching this issue
from the wrong angle.

We are thinking about how these tags would be interpreted by software, what
priorities would be given to objects like "not_plowed_in_winter" and so on.

So instead of having an endless list of possible machine readable tags, we
should simple give the information straight to the user. It is then up to
the user to decide what to do with this information.

My suggestion would be something along the following lines:

A tag called traffic_issue which would take free text as value (similar to
note)

traffic_issue='Road maintained by local 4WD club, passes over sandy inlet
that floods at high tide, four inch rocks placed by club restrict access to
high clearance vehicles'

additional tags for further information:
traffic_issue:website=http://website.com
traffic_issue:phone=12345678

and of course something for the renderers/routers:
traffic_issue:severity=none|minor|major|danger|info|block

So what should the renderer do with this information? Quite simply the
traffic_issue text should be displayed along the route (like the map notes
for example)

The routers should simply add the text together with the routing
instructions.

Then let the user decide what he or she wishes to do with this information.

Examples I could think of

One which is commonly seen in Brazil:

traffic_issue='Traffic of very long vehicles'
traffic_issue:severity=info

traffic_issue='Intense traffic of bicycles'
traffic_issue:severity=minor

traffic_issue='Road subject to assaults at night'
traffic_issue:severity=danger

traffic_issue='Not passable from November to January'
traffic_issue:severity=block

The last two are notes I've seen on some printed maps in Brazil, they
usually are shown as small yellow boxes next to the roads.

Here are some other examples from printed maps:
"Between Poconé and Porto Jofre are 122 bridges in very poor conditions."

"RS-630 is not passable during the rain season (May to September)"

"The road between Petrolina and Salgueiro should not be travelled at night"

During my travels I have found this type of information extremely valuable.
So perhaps the best we can do is simply pass it on what particular issues
we know about the road.

The renderers/routers task would simply be showing this information. The
user then decides how to handle this. For example, me may instruct the
router to ignore all traffic_issue:severity=block warnings if he happens to
drive an amphibian vehicle and does not really care about anything.

cheers

Gerald
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20140115/a11a34cd/attachment.html>


More information about the Tagging mailing list