[OSM-talk] Residential areas

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Wednesday 01 November 2006 09:54, Chris Morley wrote:
> Etienne wrote:
> > Does the following proposal satisfy all the requirements:
> > 1) Preserve the current rendering behaviour of highway=residential (but
> > mark it as deprecated)
> > 2) Use highway=unclassified, residential=yes to mark up roads with
> > houses along them
> > 3) Use landuse=residential to demarcate the residential areas
> > 4) Do not overlap areas that use the landuse tag unless they really do
> > overlap and are tagged as different layers.
>
> If you are going to introduce a new key "residential" you might as well
> allow it to have values left and right (based on the segment direction)
> to handle the streets with houses on one side only. (I look forward to
> seeing how Osmarender would deal with it.)

I think this is all getting too complicated, and if we ever move to Andy's 
improved schema it will also be slightly pointless. It seems like we all have 
different data we'd like tagged to roads (should navigation software send you 
down it, are kids playing on this street, how should a pretty map render it, 
how does it fit into $my_country's road classification schema, etc.).

I don't see what's wrong with highway=residential for now, even if we secretly 
think of it as being shorthand highway=unclassified,residential=yes. David 
Earl makes a good point when he says that added complication will mean less 
complete data, and we lose no detail with the shorthand version. I've turned 
abutters off in osmarender, but leaving them on by default and rendering them 
before any landuse tags means it's no big deal if they happen to render under 
a great big landuse=residential area.

In the long term I really think we need to sort the whole tagging system out, 
because at the moment it's a confusing free-for-all with less coherence by 
the week. I'd like us to find a way to produce a Map_Features v2 that covers 
all foreseeable needs coherently, keeping different kinds of criteria 
(official classification, surface condition, access/speed/weight etc. 
restrictions, size, lanes, what sits on either side) in separate tags.

The new schema should also be built into the editors such that it's easy to 
whack in shorthand answers, like "this is a bog standard residential road", 
and to then tweak the values that implies so that, for example, a residential 
road has a special weight restriction or a muddy road surface rather than 
tarmac. JOSM's annotation preset feature comes close to doing this.

So I'm opposed to Etienne's proposal, and suggest we find a way to help Andy 
work on the new, improved schema.

Regards,
Tom


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The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
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