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

[David Earl]

On 17/10/2007 09:50, Michael Collinson wrote:
> 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.
...

Same in Cambridge and environs: it's all done wit highway=residential 
and abutters=residential. However, it's not wasted work, the information 
is still there, and it is still by far the quickest way to do it, and in 
the absence of aerial imagery doesn't give the impression of accuracy 
that is not warranted.

I've continued to do it that way for consistency.

I too was disappointed that the abutter info was removed from the 
renderings. But they did cause problems: random circles at the ends of 
bridges, long extensions beyond the ends of roads, and a strong visual 
suggestion that a road was a dead end when it was just incomplete.

However, I have in mind an algorithm to generate urban envelopes from 
residential highways and abutters, which means we can get the best of 
both worlds in the future, so I don't see residential highway tagging as 
a waste of time.

Even with residential landuse areas I think it is important to 
distinguish residential abutters as this has an effect on the default 
speed one might assign to to the road in a journey time application.

David