[talk-au] New key proposal - paved=yes/no

[David Bannon]

Interesting proposal on the OSM Tagging list. Oz would have a
unpaved/paved ratio as higher that most countries, we should have an
opinion on this.

So far, reaction has been mixed, some (including myself) welcoming it
and some seeing it as a duplicate of surface=

Comments folks ?

David

On Sat, 2014-09-20 at 23:42 +0200, Tomasz Kaźmierczak wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've posted the below message on the forum, and have been directed
> from there to this mailing list, thus re-posting it.
> 
> Idea
> 
> I would like to suggest making the paved key for highways (and
> probably other types of elements) official. Taginfo for paved:
> http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/paved#values
> 
> The above shows that the key is already being used, but the Wiki
> doesn't describe this key, instead redirecting Key:paved to the
> article about Key:surface.
> 
> Rationale
> 
> Currently, the surface key is being used as a way of saying that a
> given highway is paved or unpaved, but often the value for the surface
> key is not a generic paved or unpaved, but a specific surface type is
> given.This is of course very useful for describing the particular
> surface type a given highway has. However, in some cases, a simple
> information on just whether a highway is paved or not, would be very
> useful. One such case would be navigation software – if a user chooses
> to avoid unpaved roads, the software can check the value of the
> surface key, but in practice most (all?) of the navigation software
> only checks for a subset of all the possible values the surface key
> can have. This leads to incorrect (in terms of what the user expects)
> navigation when, for example, the surface is set to some value that
> describes an unpaved road, not recognized by the navigation software –
> if the software assumes that all highways are paved, unless explicitly
> stated otherwise (by recognized values of known keys), then, in
> consequence, it assumes that the road in question is paved.
> 
> If the paved key was widely used, then the navigation software would
> have a simple and clear way of checking whether a given road is paved
> or not. The default value of the paved key for highways could be yes,
> so that it would be consistent with the assumption that highways in
> general are paved.
> 
> I don't mean that we should stop using the paved and unpaved values
> for the surface key – I'm sure those generic values are useful in some
> cases. However, using the paved key would be also very useful. Also,
> the surface=paved could also implicate paved=yes and similarly
> surface=unpaved could implicate paved=no, so that duplication of the
> information could be avoided when the generic paved and unpaved values
> are set for the surface key.
> 
> I believe that adding an article for the paved key to the Wiki would
> encourage people to use this tag, and navigation software makers to
> implement support for it in their applications.
> 
> What do you think about that? 
> 
>  
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tomek
> 
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