[Tagging] Clarification unclassified vs residential

[Fernando Trebien]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 6:15 AM Volker Schmidt <voschix at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2019 at 20:09, Fernando Trebien <fernando.trebien at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think Lone Pine [2] would be interesting to discuss because it
>> doesn't have any major routes linking larger places passing through
>> it.  The highways leading to it are currently highway=residential and
>> should probably be highway=unclassified.
>>
>> >  [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/150932853
>
> Country roads imported with the old TIGER imports are uniformly tagged "residential".
> And in many cases this is correct in the sense that they are typically used to access property along them or in the neighbourhood.

I'm aware of the difficulties of data imports, so my remark is meant
only as a reflection of what it should eventually become as mapping
work progresses.

> In the specific case, if you consult satellite imagery you will see many dwellings along them.

This isn't a very strong argument since many street/road types (from
highway=pedestrian all the way up to highway=primary and sometimes
even highway=trunk in remote areas) often have dwellings directly
accessible from the road, especially within dense urban areas.

However, this brings us back to the OP's question on whether
highway=unclassified is its own hierarchical level between
highway=residential and highway=tertiary or simply a description of a
local road mostly not having any residences that should be considered
at the same hierarchical level as highway=residential. The wiki
describes them as the lowest level in the "interconnecting grid
network," from which I understand that it is probably intended to work
more like the idea of a "quaternary", from which one would expect it
to fully connect to other unclassified/tertiary/secondary/... roads
even when passing through urbanized areas with many directly
accessible residences.

-- 
Fernando Trebien