[OSM-talk] Residential areas

[Andy Robinson]

Tom Chance wrote:
>Sent: 03 November 2006 12:48 PM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Residential areas
>
>Ahoy,
>
>On Friday 03 November 2006 12:25, David Earl wrote:
>> The problem is abutters on *segments*, yes?
>
>No. If you've followed the discussion, the problem is with abutters
>themselves. They:
>
>- Are ugly when compared to landuse areas
>- Don't currently cater for different uses on each side of a way
>- Don't give much detail for handy uses, e.g. it's a residential road so
>it's
>best to avoid it if possible in routing software, or it has great big
>warehouses on the right so look out for them, etc.
>
>The consensus, so far as I can tell, is to deprecate abutters somehow*,
>move
>towards using landuse areas for shading on maps and keep in mind handy uses
>for the stuff on either side of a road when working on Andy's new tagging
>schema.
>

My take on this is as follows.

An abutter is something/someone that abuts against the feature. In our
current discussion case we are principally referring to the fact that we
have certain types of abutters running alongside and immediately adjacent to
highways. In this respect the abutter tag on a highway is correct. However
the point is taken that it would be useful to define different abutter types
to the different sides of the highway.

The abutters tag was used to make a pseudo rendering of land use before area
functionality was brought in. Now that we have area support (at least a
method of rendering anyway) it is right that for the colouring of landmass
we should where possible use an area feature.

However the abutters tag is still of interest and use because it allows an
association to be made between a feature and its immediate neighbour. That
may have a number of uses in the future.

Therefore I believe that the abutters tag on highways should remain without
deprecation. However I would agree that we should move away from colouring
landmass using the abutters tag in osmarender.

Cheers,

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk 

>Regards,
>Tom
>
>* Whether with Etienne's suggestion of highway=unclassified,residential=yes
>leaving abutters in place for highway=residential, or by simply removing
>abutters from osmarender altogether.
>
>--
>The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
> - Kundera
>
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