[talk-au] Overmapping?

[Roy Wallace]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:00 PM, Michael <spam-me at gmx-ist-cool.de> wrote:
>
> The footways along Duoro Road and Harbour Street (but not the one
> between them!) do not carry any information IMHO

I disagree. They indicate that there is a footway there. If it's a
verifiable fact, IMHO it rightly belongs in the OSM database.

> but clutter the map
> display, especially on GPS units. With three times as much nodes per
> meter of the street(the actual road + 2 footways), data processing and
> editing is getting ever more resource hungry.

This, on the other hand, may well be true. But IMHO this is NOT a
reason to limit what gets entered into the OSM database, but simply to
*pre-process* the OSM data (filtering out unwanted details as desired)
prior to loading onto the GPS unit.

> For pedestrian routing, the same information can be represented by
> adding pavement=left/right/both (I think there was a proposed tag, but I
> can't find it on the map features page) to the highway and
> highway=crossing at the crossing nodes (where currently there are
> mapping errors, because the footways and highways are not connected).
> What is lost, is precision of the map display at the meter-scale, i.e.
> at the scale of GPS accuracy.

This argument comes up now and then. The conclusion is always: each to
their own. But please don't remove explicitly mapped ways and replace
them with tags if the ways are already correct.

> I don't think there is any tag that currently renders. One might imagine
> having a wider border of the road on the side of the pavement, in the
> correct color (footway/cycleway/path). This even has the advantage that
> the pavement remains visible on smaller zoom levels, where in 1:1
> mapping, the overwide drawing of the roads usually hides it.
> IIRC there was a proposed implementation for osmarender doing sth. along
> these lines a while ago.

This is a separate issue.