[Tagging] Clarification unclassified vs residential

[Greg Troxel]

Florian Lohoff <f at zz.de> writes:

> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dunclassified
> 	"Public roads of low importance within town and cities that are not
> 	residential may also be highway=unclassified."
>
> Residential roads are by definition:
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=residential
> 	"This tag is used for roads accessing or around residential areas."
>
> So - bringing this together - as soon as there is residential usage
> it cant be unclassified? Am i so wrong?

I think that is actually wrong...

In the UK, an unclassified road is signed with U and a number.  There
can be houses along them.  There can be houses along A roads.  In the
US, I know of a ighway=secondary which is a "state highway", one level
down from "US highway", the non-motorway national system.  There are
some businesses on it, but there are many houses.  This is totally
normal.  But it's not tagged residential because of houses - it's
secondary because that's the importance in the road network.

So saying "if there are hosues it must be residential" is wrong.

Really the notion of "unclassified" is odd, and it probably should be
"quaternary".  Arguably residential should then be highway=level5,
regardless of housing, and perhaps some tag on all highways about
residential or not - but as I said earlier, you can tell that from
landuse.

But, I don't really expect this to change other than by slow drift.