[talk-au] Traffic Signals

[Steve Bennett]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 9:09 AM, John Henderson <snowgum at gmx.com> wrote:
> The benefit is in greater accuracy and completeness.  If we can do
> better than commercial street directories, then why not?

At the cost of managing that extra information. So far, I haven't seen
much evidence that we have ways of aggregating excess information into
more manageable chunks.

> Insisting that everyone do it that way would be a pain.  But if the
> information is available then I see no problem in my capturing it if
> convenient.  Nor to I see any pain caused to the user of the more
> complete maps.

Put it this way: how would you render a single circle for any
intersection that has a traffic light? That is, if there are traffic
light nodes at one intersection, you still only want to render one
circle. It's a pretty obvious use case.

How would you count the number of traffic lights along a given route?
The scheme that's been described here would return double the actual
number.

I'm not saying extra information isn't sometimes a good thing, but the
task of simplifying that down to a useful set of information isn't
trivial.

Perhaps we want to distinguish between an "intersection with lights"
node and an "actual traffic light" node.

Steve