[OSM-talk] Highway tags and other junk

Tom Chance tom at acrewoods.net
Thu Dec 14 07:04:45 GMT 2006


Ahoy,

On Thursday 14 December 2006 03:22, Ben Robbins wrote:
> Before you  say these don’t need to be labeled separately please note that
> the average speed on the 1st type would be about 55mph, while on the 4th it
> would be about 15mph.  A route planner must sort these apart.

That can be covered with the speed limit tag.


> 1)  Make an additional value, which has 4 possible tags in which you enter
> 1 of them.  These are predefined by how they appear in the field.
> 2)  Have 4 tags to go under highway.

I think the best way to go would be to clearly separate the official 
classification (probably unclassified in these cases) from the physical 
features (width, surface condition, etc.) and features relevant for 
particular contexts (speed limit, safety for cyclists, pavement, etc.)

If we made this distinction then it would suddenly make it easy for you to 
have a really good schema for different gradations of track, as you have 
developed on the wiki. I suppose that with the current schema it seems a bit 
overkill for most people's needs, so ends up existing in parallel with the 
more blunt "highway=track" tag.

It has been a long while since I scanned every message on this list, but 
whatever happened to the proposed new feature schema that took into account 
these different categories of properties? Was it Andy Robinson who was 
diligently working on it in his spare time?


> This is a very much needed tag, as any users that don’t live in urban areas
> must shorely understand.  Even if someone only wants 1 track tag, it still
> should not be under highway= as a track is not a public right of way in any
> form (like all the other highway tags), unless an additional tag is stuck
> on it.  E.g.  a track may be a byway, and therefore the track has access
> rights of the byway.

Another reason why we sorely need a distinction between highway classification 
and surface type is a road in St Albans that has houses down it, but is 
basically a dirt track. At the moment I tagged it as highway=track but that's 
far from ideal.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera




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