[Tagging] [OSM-talk] highway=residential_link

[Greg Troxel]

Andrew Guertin <andrew.guertin at uvm.edu> writes:

> 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 .

I'm very mixed on this.  With motorway_link, I think it's good that it
is a different road type, because a motorway_link is very different in
terms of speed, curvature, #lanes, etc. and there are strong norms about
what's the motorway proper and what are links (that do get a little
fuzzy in some very-high-speed interchanges, but those are fairly rare).

In residential (or unclassified), the link ways and the main ways can't
in general be clearly separated on quality terms.  But, in the example
at

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/27854328#map=17/41.85903/12.49988&layers=N

it does seem clear that the link way is considered an auxiliary way to
reverse direction and not really part of the main road.  It presumably
doesn't really have a name.  So tagging that as link makes sense.

On the third hand, one wouldn't call it a onramp or a slip road, and one
wouldn't say that it is for the purpose of changing speed to match the
road it's for.

So I would lean to calling this highway=residential and perhaps
link=yes, which would suppress the warnings about not having a name, but
leave link roads that really do have the speed-matching or
limited-access access property as foo_link.

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