[Talk-us] Medians and reverts

[Craig Hinners]

Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com>
> I would not separate a road with a double-yellow in the middle into two separate ways

And millions of miles of two-lane roads with opposing flows have been
modeled in OSM as single ways. But why?

I'd submit that it's because the current de facto usage of ways is to
model "contiguous areas of improved driving surfaces", not "traffic
flows".

To prove my point, if I milled out a one-foot wide swath of asphalt
where the double yellow lines are to create a "median" consisting of
nothing other than dirt, but changed absolutely nothing else in regards
to the traffic flows, I'd suddenly be expected to model this in OSM as
two discrete ways.

All I've done is replaced paint with dirt. I've changed nothing in
regards to the legality of transferring between the flows (paint or
median, I still am not allowed to transfer between the flows). I've
changed nothing about the physical ability to transfer between them (I
can drive over a patch of dirt as easily as I can drive over a stripe of
paint). Yet I've changed how I model them.