[talk-au] Traffic Signals

[Steve Bennett]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 9:43 AM, David Murn <davey at incanberra.com.au> wrote:
>From a routing perspective, its more useful to have the information on
> the road intersection.  While it might render nicer if you put objects
> geographically where they are (separated from the road), from a routing
> perspective thats not much use unless you use a relation to relate the
> traffic lights to the roadway the traffic lights are on.

This is the general tension between a schematic diagram and an
accurate representation of the world, which has become more accute
since the arrival of Nearmap, where sub-metre accuracy now matters. It
also causes the problem with footpaths meeting roads: part of the
footpath represents the actual physical location of the footpath, and
part is a schematic line showing that it does in fact connect with the
road. But no distinction is made. It shows up with bus stops too: the
bus stop is not physically part of the road, but schematically is.

The only solution I can see is that we end up with some tags that are
explicitly schematic rather than geographically accurate, and with
some kind of relation between the physical location node and the
schematic node
Steve