[OSM-talk] Residential areas

[Interlug]

On Tue, 2006-31-10 at 19:20 +0000, Etienne wrote:
> On 10/31/06, David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
>         > On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 05:40:26PM +0000, SteveC wrote:
>         > > * @ 31/10/06 04:14:48 PM 80n80n at gmail.com wrote:
>         > > > Tom
>         > > > I am now tagging streets as highway=unclassified instead
>         of
> The reason for not continuing to use highway=residential is for
> back-compatability reasons.
> 
> If you use landuse=residential then you can be more precise.   For
> example, shading just one side of a road.  However, if the road is
> tagged as highway=residential you'll still get the shading on both
> sides of the road. 
> 
> One way of preventing that is to switch off the abutters rendering
> rule for highway=residential, but then you loose the abutters
> everywhere else on the map.  So unless you fix the whole town you
> don't any real benefit from using the landuse tag. 
> 
> 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. 

I miss the highway=minor tag and see the loss of the highway=residential
tag as, well, a loss.  

Abutters aside, the residential and minor tags give me navigation cues.
"Take the minor road as far into the subdivision as possible, then the
residential to destination."  When a subdivision is an undifferentiated
mass of crescents and culs-de-sac, a visual cue (in the form of
rendering "minor" differently from "residential") tells the driver which
road is the preferred route.  

This preferred route may be wider, and get preferential treatment at
stop / yield intersections.  It may also be the likely local bus route,
or preferential route for taxicabs seeking fares.  

Landuse tags make for a beautiful map and ways make for a natural
boundary for landuse areas.  But what about the boundary way?  With no
highway=industrial, highway=minor or highway=residential tags, how do we
determine from the map if the road on the industrial/residential border
is suitable for large trucks?  Is that way industrial or residential?
It has both landuses abutting it.  

In the suburban sprawl here, it isn't unheard of for a road on the town
line to be a relatively low quality road with farms on one side and
subdivisions on the other.  The suburbs expand to the other side of the
road and at some point the road may be upgraded.  If you know which of
these roads is upgraded you can plan your trip better.  

And none of these roads, distinct in important ways depending on how you
navigate them, are nationally classified around here.  They're all
municipal / regional.  

I think we are losing resolution by deprecating minor and residential.
I think we need a highway=industrial tag.  Here, industrial implies
wider road, larger setbacks and higher clearance to overhead wires.  Not
a nice place for a stroll or bicycle ride when a residential is one
block over.