[talk-au] Lanes tag

[Paul HAYDON]

Hi John, 

It occurs to me there's at least one other case which warrants tagging the lanes - a two-way road (or section thereof) having only a single lane.   I.E. when there are LESS than one in each direction, making passing difficult or unsafe at normal speeds. 

Any thoughts? 


Cheers, 
Paul. 
------------------------------

Message: 3 
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 13:11:07 +1100 
From: John Henderson <snowgum at gmx.com> 
To: talk-au at openstreetmap.org 
Subject: Re: [talk-au] dirt roads 
Message-ID: <508359BB.6040403 at gmx.com> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 21/10/12 12:03, dbannon at internode.on.net wrote:

> lanes=[1; 2]

I thing the "lanes" tag is best not used, unless there's more than two marked lanes on a two-way road, or more than one lane on a one-way road.

This is the recommendation in the Australian tagging guidelines: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Roads_Tagging#Number_of_lanes

I have two reasons for arguing this.

Firstly, it's something else that would need checking when doing OSM maintenance (and quite unnecessarily). And it's something else to get wrong if it's used routinely. It's easier for everybody if its used is reserved for the special cases.

Secondly, as an active mapper, I often download the whole of Australia every week for use as route-proving on my Garmin GPSs. If every road in Australia had a lanes tag, that'd be a lot more data to download... 

John