[OSM-talk] Advanced highway tagging

[Andrew MacKinnon]

> Do you have any examples of other maps where road drawing is not based
> solely on objective features? I'd be interested to see how they work.
> Or are you breaking new (cartographical) ground with trying to combine
> autocartography with subjectivity? I can imagine specific cartography
> (a map of a limited set of roads, drawn individually by someone)
> incorporating specific subjective features, but I'd be interested in
> altases or similar doing so).

All commercial online maps decide which roads are major and which are
minor on a subjective basis. Obviously, the fact that there is a road
at point x is completely objective, but deciding how important a road
is is at least somewhat subjective. Look at any of the commercial
online map services - nearly all of them decide whether a road should
be coloured as major or minor in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, not
directly based on the road designation, the width of the road, the
number of lanes, or any other objectively measurable factor or
mathematically derived combination of objective factors.