[OSM-talk] Surveying

[William Waites]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 03:29:09PM +0000, David Earl wrote:
>
> In general I've tagged streets within the urban envelope as 
> highway=residential or highway=<whatever>;abutters=residential. I think 
> that should hint to clients that the speed is the default. Then only when 
> there is an exception need the speed actually be mentioned. (I've done that 
> sometimes, but not been terribly diligent about it, though the info is all 
> there on my dictaphone files).

That sounds useful for inferring a lower speed limit on these segments,
however for a route finding algorithm it would be nice to have a number
for what the default is, either tagged directly on the segment or on an
enclosing polygon -- for urban areas this might be the municipal
boundaries. Since the default will be different in different provinces
or countries, how else to answer the question "what is the expected time
it will take to follow this route?"

So given your practice, we would need maxspeed tags for municipal,
region, country boundary polygons with the outer enclosing one holding
the global defaults and a possibility to override it at each
successively more specific boundary and finally at each line segment.
Perhaps this makes more sense than algorithmicly going and tagging each
line segment with a best guess individually.

Do such tags at municipal, region and country boundaries exist?

-w