[Talk-us] Odd road / odd structure

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 10:19 PM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> ​While 'livable street'​
>
> ​is an Urban Design term of at for the concept in some areas, I don't see
> it in OSM wiki or taginfo ? [5] .  OSM seems to use the similar
> highway=living_street  [6]  for low speed limits, pedestrian as primary but
> not exclusive, which doesn't seem to be the case in the grassy-and-walk
> shared front yards shown by the original question on thread here (but
> without Mews/alley in rear).
>

While I agree mostly with this, I don't think the grass is even remotely
intended as a pedestrian facility in this case, but what passes for a front
yard in what would almost certainly be a mews or alleyway.  This particular
execution of the concept would fall into the territory of "I could do this,
but don't expect me to cut the grass ever" and "butthurt HOAs" from
experience, as if literally anyone spends time on the street side of their
home in this kind of layout, much less enough to even remotely care that
someone's lawn is...really anything even remotely close to fire code height.

The living_street examples in OSM wiki appear to be extreme traffic calming
> to restore in-street playability to 1950s suburban, 1930s urban level but
> still tolerate commuter cars returning home and a UPS delivery through the
> street-ball play, which is not the feature exhibited by original post.​


There just plain isn't a direct mapping to the source material (ie, UK)
concept and the US concept at all, and the US is a weirdly variable system,
so there's a lot of approximation in play.  I'm not saying there isn't room
for negotiation for certain concepts (trunk versus motorway versus primary;
service versus living street versus residential are seemingly vi vs emacs
arguments in the American OSM community when these have very clearly
identifiable mappings in the UK OC).  However, I believe that things like
apartment driveways and this particular way are strong candidates for the
closest American equivalent to a living street, in much the same sense that
a trunk maps relatively nicely to surface expressways (New Englanders and
urban midwesterners would call it a parkway, folks in the pacific northwest
would call it an expressway) whereas motorway maps immaculately to roads
that meet the Eisenhower Interstate standard with extremely rare
exception).  And then there's footway/path/cycleway issues.

I may (and probably should) flesh out a blog post with my examples for each
in a US perspective at this point, even if my regions of expertise are
largely Hawaii plus what is part of the NBA Northwest Division or the
Canadian Hockey League's Western League, with a strong specialization at
this point for southern plains situations as a summarization.  I'm not
saying my way is the right way, but we've all run into this "bad congruence
to the original concept" situation with the UK's immaculate equivalences to
OSM tagging by definition that I'd like to compare fleshed out
perspectives...
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