[OSM-talk] Highway tags and other junk

[Ben Robbins]

>Having read through your email...

Really?  Maybe I have discribed my opions extreamly badly...

>and looked at the tracktype proposal, it occurs to me that you are possibly 
>thinking about this too much and form an even more local point of view than 
>even being UK centric.

Indeed.  After all Its only in England that mud, grass and stones excists, 
and in contrast words like ''Motorway'' are used in all different 
laugwiches....?!!

>arguing road designations on grounds of their physical nature is verging on 
>rediculous, shows localised thinking in extremis and goes against what 
>people are trying to achieve with regards to traffic management by means of 
>these designations.

Right, are you awair that its not just roads being mapped now?  How classing 
a way by phisical attriubates has anything to do with localisation baffles 
me, as that makes no sence.

>Travelling around the globe, I have driven on many roads which have been 
>designated as 'Trunk Roads' but which ranged from 8 lane highways with hard 
>shoulders, through dual carriage ways, single lane roads with passing 
>points and on down to a line of poles marking a route across a desert.

Local definitions of the word Trunk dont dictate how something is to be 
tagged in osm.  That is local thinking!.  If a road thats called a trunk is 
a small single windy road then it should be tagged with the appropriate osm 
tag.

>In the last instance getting out the vehicle to measure the width of the 
>road to ensure it was of a certain type would have been a bit pointless 
>(>1000km?).

At no point did I say that I am proposing to get out and measure each road.  
Hence I made the road discriptions based on if you have to squeeze past 
another car or have to reverse to let it threw for example.  This requires 
either observation of your actions, or an estimation to within a few feet (a 
meter).  This can even be seen in the gps data in some cases.

>The important thing was that these were all trunk roads, thus need recorded 
>same fashion and be given the same basic rendering on a map. However but 
>this needs then to be augmented by additional keys describing the width, 
>surface type, verges, hedges, fences etc and minor changes to the 
>rendering. Whilst this leads to a single highway having, a large number of 
>additional property tags which have to be labouriously keyed in for each 
>way, it gives the freedom to describe the exact nature of the highway. 
>Whereas grouping the properties as you have done with tracktype restricts 
>the variants to too few, which are potentially only capable of describing 
>the tracks in your locality in the UK, let alone all the highways around 
>the world.

As I said in one of the posts above, Im not suggesting people cant add 
speicifc tags if nessesery, but from much researching I have found that 
every track can fall into one of these types.   After all We all live in the 
same universe with the same properties.  Please read threw the wiki, and 
mailing list again.

>When it comes to measuring width, if there is a very tight restriction then 
>will often be signs giving the width, otherwise from my point of view 
>giving the number of lanes is sufficient and this can be done without the 
>need to leave the vehicle.

I agree, as Im not proposing stating the width!

You seem to think Im arguing the exact oposite of what Ive said in all 
aspects.  Please read again, and dont send rather aggressive emails without 
it being constructive.   There really is no point in a flame war unless what 
is said is 1) fully read, and 2) fully understood, preir to debate, in wich 
the outcome is garanteed to be productive.

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