[OSM-talk] oneway=1

[Tapio Sokura]

Arieh Skliarouk wrote:
> I think it is wrong to specify street direction explicitly, at least
> for the long term. Street direction tend to change, and you don't want
> OSM users to get tickets for going wrong way?
> 
> I am sure commercial mapping companies have some kind of agreement
> with authorities regarding directions change. Until OSM has something
> similar, we can't rely on this information to remain static.

How can you be so sure? I'm almost as sure as you that there is _no_ 
such agreement between authorities and mapping companies. Big mapping 
companies (navteq, teleatlas, etc) might have some kind of subscriptions 
to map updates from national map data providers, but it's there to 
generally keep the map roughly updated and not to specifically follow 
road direction changes. Anyway the changes might take a year or two or 
even more before they trickle down to the general public as a part of 
new products or as updates to the old data.

Anyway no road mapping provider I know of guarantees anything about the 
map data contents. The driver is solely responsible for following the 
traffic rules. I would've gone the wrong way up a oneway street many 
times so far, if I had blindly trusted the GPS-receiver's map. Official 
marine charts can be a different thing, they are sometimes guaranteed by 
the local mapping authority to be accurate about waterways minimum draft 
and placement.

> PDA-client should notify the user about questionable status of the
> street direction and allow clarification of the data by user, with
> subsequent upload to the server.

This could be handy for keeping maps generally updated as well. The 
problem is that you need special software in the client to notice and 
update these things.

   Tapio