[Tagging] highway=residential_link

[Andrew Guertin]

A question recently came up as to whether highway=residential_link is a 
meaningful tag or whether uses of it should be changed to some other 
value (like highway=residential or highway=service).

This tag has no description in the wiki, though it is analogous to the 
other highway=*_link types described on 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_link .

There are only 23 current uses of the tag, but many others were recently 
removed. By going through (by hand) the recent edits of an editor who 
removed them, I've come up with a list of 58 more objects that used it 
[1]. If anyone knows of a programmatic way of finding objects that 
previously used a tag, I'd be interested to know it.

Of those 81 current and recent uses that I worked with,
* They occurred in North America (36), South America (30), Europe (11), 
and Australia (4)
* 35 were added in 2015, 38 were added in 2014, and the remaining 8 were 
added in 2010-2013
* I count 33 unique users that added the tag
* 19 of the uses had a value for name="*", 62 did not have a name

* Of the 36 North American uses, I personally think 
highway=residential_link makes sense on 16 of them, while 12 should be a 
higher highway=*_link and 8 should not be a _link at all.


highway=residential_link is not currently rendered in 
openstreetmap-carto, and a request for adding it in February 2015 was 
declined 
(https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1280), due 
to low usage and being undocumented. That bug mentions that it is 
supported in various routing apps, and it WAS supported in the HOT map 
style until that support was removed recently.


So the question is, should uses of highway=residential_link be edited 
away, should they be left as-is (unless a different highway type is 
clearly better), or should the tag be approved and documented?


--Andrew





[1] Objects that previously used highway=residential_link. This list was 
generated by hand, and might have some mistakes. Also, not all of these 
necessarily should have used the tag.

275610032, 275610033, 275610026, 275610025, 275355353, 269193467, 
268796394, 262798921, 262715792, 262287021, 259433293, 259433291, 
259136210, 256321591, 256321612, 256256231, 82529183, 256250694, 
256250692, 255858772, 255734560, 255734548, 255734547, 255734546, 
255285030, 255282915, 255282916, 242373220, 240563513, 238260570, 
237128774, 222995985, 318225690, 219160095, 200773019, 191613798, 
183497432, 174739362, 174739436, 173790274, 152304285, 95348547, 
87908508, 87908510, 87908507, 83285340, 54356292, 54356293, 45812108, 
45812107, 39722340, 35248433, 148015236, 35242001, 35121698, 35121488, 
18820600, 6086632, 6107802,



On 11/09/2015 01:39 AM, GerdP wrote:
> I think this should really be discussed in the tagging list.
> I only know a discussion in Germany which came to the
> conclusion that tags like unclassified_link, residential_link and
> service_link make not much sense:
> http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=26083
> The wiki doesn't mention those _link types as well, and my
> understanding is that only major roads have a link (if link
> in english means what we call "Abfahrt/ Auffahrt" in Germany,
> I would describe it as a lane that allows to decrease/increase
> speed.