[OSM-talk] "Unsurfaced road" and "Byway"?

[Mike Collinson]

At 04:04 PM 16/12/2007, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>> Byway (highway=byway) is an unsurfaced track in the countryside with foot,
>> horse, bike and car rights - part of the UK rights of way system. They are
>> almost never found in towns. Typically waymarked as a right of way, though
>> some aren't.
>
>ok, thanks.  I think those ways do not exist in Germany.
>
>> Unsurfaced (highway=unsurfaced; example = Rownhams Court, Southampton near
>> the Ordnance Survey building) is a residential road with a rough, non-made
>> up surface. They'll normally have a name and houses along them.
>
>Bad, bad, bad, that you went for this shortcut.  Now, highway is a
>very bewildered keyword.  We usually tag those ways as residential
>plus surface=uppaved.
>
>I hope Mapnik and these other will learn sometime in the the future to
>differentiate between paved and unpaved foot and cycle ways.  For Mapnik
>I'd liek to propose to frame the dashed red or blue line either with
>solid or dashed black lines.

Osmarender (the other!) certainly used to render surface=unpaved with dashed bounding lines. I certainly hope also that this would be part of very basic support in any renderer, it is vitally important in many parts of the world where the difference can add many hours to a journey.

Mike