[OSM-talk] Proper use of landuse=residential ?

[Michael Collinson]

At 09:32 AM 10/17/2007, Tom Chance wrote:
>On Wednesday 17 October 2007 02:19:09 Brent Easton wrote:
> > My preferred method is not to use landuse=residential at all, just fill up
> > the area with highway=residential or abutters=residential streets.
>
>Can I ask why?
>
>So far as I know, abutters are deprecated and landuse areas are preferred!
>They look *much* neater as well.

I mapped central and southern Sydney almost exclusively using 
abutters=* and it gave a very nice result in Osmarender. Sadly 
support seems to have been removed which has wasted a lot of work - 
to duplicate using landuse=* effectively means drawing a box round 
each street.  I don't know whether Australian town planning differs 
from British, but they really do zone around streets, i.e. you get an 
industrial street, a retail street and residential streets in one 
area and the method is very effective and quick to record and enter up.

landuse=* is useful (and elegant) if you either have Yahoo imagery 
available or know a local area intimately enough or are prepared to 
spend enough time working out how far a particular land type extends 
behind each street you go down.  Its chief drawback from a data entry 
POV is that when you come back to an area in JOSM or Potlatch, all 
the lines going everywhere is confusing.

abutters=* is very, very useful when you are linear mapping, i.e. 
going up and down urban streets without a clear picture on the ground 
as to how they all fit together.  Its chief drawback from a data 
entry POV is when you get a street with houses on one side and 
industrial buildings or some such on the other.

Mike
Stockholm

Here is an example of an area heavily using abutters=* if anyone 
wants/can re-render it with the right support:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-33.88253739538388&lon=151.206447696367&zoom=15&layers=0BT