[OSM-talk-be] Verbodsbord C3

[Ben Laenen]

On Monday 30 September 2013 23:58:36 André Pirard wrote:
> Désolé, j'ai mal exprimé ma pensée, j'interprétais vos raisonnements.
> Mais si, si vous voulez laisser passer les vélos, il faut ajouter
> bicycle=yes Les tags OSM respectent les règles OSM et pas le code de la
> route belge. On ne s'y retrouverait pas si l'interprétation d'OSM suivait
> les règles particulières de chaque pays.

Well, this discussion has been held a lot of times in the past. It's 
completely impossible to mold the entire world into a set of tag rules without 
exceptions in any country at all. It already starts with the definition of 
each different category of vehicle, so we couldn't even make a tag set which 
is valid for the entire world if we were to tag every vehicle type explicitely 
(think roads that have motorcar=yes, goods=yes, bicycle=yes, motorcycle=yes, 
foot=yes, horse=yes etc). We in Belgium have two types of mopeds, in other 
countries they have mofa and moped, other countries have a single type of 
moped, and then the rules start to change what it means exactly if you tag a 
road with moped=no.

So yes, we have to have country defined rules about access tags. And one of 
them is that access=destination will always allow pedestrians, cyclists and 
horse riders in Belgium. Another one for example is that a motorroad=yes will 
disallow pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, horse riders and other animal drivers 
without having to add all these explicitely.

I know it's not an elegant solution, and that it does put a big burden on all 
data users to interpret what access tags mean in every country, but I always 
had this "dream" already quite some time ago that one day some kind of a 
library would be built that would take the tags on a road, and then you can 
ask if a certain vehicle is allowed or not for that given country. A place 
where all these local country rules would be defined. But I guess that's 
beyond this discussion :-)

Greetings
Ben