[OSM-talk] Forking ways?

[Jochen Topf]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 01:32:55PM +0200, Adrian Frith wrote:
> I'm mapping a suburb which has quite a lot of streets that "fork"; in
> fact I have one street name which looks like:
> 
>           |
>           |
>           |
>           +----------+---------
>           |          |
>           |          |
>           |          |
>           |          |
> ----------+----------+---------
> 
> The question I have is: do I make all the segments into one way that
> forks and isn't topologically a line; or do I make several ways with the
> same name, dividing it up into separate non-forking lines?

If you have a way which is not a line, Osmarender can't render the name
properly. (I don't know about Mapnik, but suspect it has similar
problems.) It also leads to problems with some data exports (for
instance to Garmin maps) where you get spurious segments in that case.

So I recommend having only ways which are contigous, non-branching and
with ordered segments.

In cases like yours, I tend to have one or two long ways winding around
which have most of the segments and some smaller ways with the rest of
the segments. For instance a common layout is a residential road with
some little stub dead-end roads going from it. And they all have the
same name. In this case I would have one way for the "major" residential
road and then more ways for each dead end.

You can set the tag "osmarender:renderName" to "false" on the little
roads if you want to, which keeps Osmarender from rendering them.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298