[Tagging] Driving side

[Tobias Knerr]

On 22.03.2014 14:30, John Packer:
> I think having only one value (driving_side=opposite (or inverted))
> would be better to tag highways.
> It is a little shameful to admit it, but sometimes I confuse left and
> right; so by restricting this tag's values there wouldn't be any
> confusion, and restrict it's use only to highways that actually need
> them (besides making it simpler to use).

It's not only highways that need them. That would tell an application
about the exceptions, but how is it supposed to know the default driving
side for a country if it isn't tagged?

Of course the application could consult an external database, but by
that reasoning, countries (and cities) wouldn't need population tags,
translated names, ISO-Codes, currency tags and so on either.
Nevertheless, some people like to map all that and we have keys for
these purposes.

That using these values poses a problem for people who confuse left and
right is unfortunate, but with those inverted highways being really
rare, I think looking at a labelled left/right arrow before tagging it
would be a feasible workaround?

> This tag never went through a formal proposal process, and have very few
> uses, so I think there is no impediment for changing it's use.

Changing it wouldn't be a problem, which is why I support adding
highways as a use case. I just don't think changing the values would be
an improvement.

> Of course, another option is to restrict /left/right/ values to
> countries and the /inverted/ value to highways, but if there is no
> interest to applying this tag to the countries, then it might as well be
> restricted to highways.

With a tag that has been used on 4 countries and 14 highways, it's a bit
too early to analyse mappers' interest imo.

Tobias