[talk-ph] changes of road types

[Ray]

Hi,

> Reviewing the map reveals that many places roads seems to have too high
> of a classification, misleading people to use roads that are not meant
> for a lot of traffic.
>
>  From an overall perspective the classification of roads should be used
> to guide people which roads to prefer.

+1
I'm also in favor of tagging the roads after their properties and how 
good you can travel on them. Eugine explained it very well.

When i can recognize a better type on the images than "road" i'll change 
it for nearly the same reasons Ian pointed out.

For residential vs. unclassified: a road (or part of) which doesn't have 
[a couple of] houses is IMHO unclassified. Maybe you can describe 
residential as an special form of unclassified (i.g. not tertiary). 
There are houses around so expect slow driving cos of parking cars and 
people walking around.

When someone traces a new road from images and don't know what kind of 
road it is he should follow the legal classification. Later someone with 
local knowledge can retag the road / split it up. On the satellite 
images you can also see how much houses are around, so residential 
should be easy.

> Assuming that all motorway, trunk, primary, secondary and tertiary roads
> have been mapped long ago, newbies should only be concerned with the
> lower classes of roads.
>
> I suggest the out come of this discussion will be a series of photos of
> typical roads and how to tag them.
>
> I have started a document already for this purpose so this discussion is
> very welcome :-)
>
> http://idisk.mac.com/michael.riber//Public/osmph/Road Types 0.0.doc

A guide with pictures is a great idea. Looking at the list, i would use 
footway for roads / tracks to narrow for cars. Or highway=path and foot 
/ bicycle = yes if this matters.
Pedestrian is "For town centres and civic areas, where wide expanses of 
hard surface are provided for pedestrians to walk (often between 
shops)." (Wiki)

As maning said, we need to get more use of track and tracktype. Can you 
include this in your document?

I suggest also that we make use of surface and lane keys.
surface=paved/unpaved/compacted will be important for rural roads and 
navigation.

Ray