[OSM-talk] Left and Right - a proposal

[Ben Laenen]

On Sunday 31 August 2008, robin paulson wrote:
> i agree with your points frederik - left and right are somewhat
> subjective and not obvious.
>
> someone suggested a while back on talk, that once a way is drawn, we
> don't allow it's direction to be changed and for one way streets, we
> use oneway=-1 if it is pointing in the wrong direction. this could be
> enforced for any tags (including incline) that rely on the direction
> of the way.
> this would completely negate any issues of changing the direction of
> ways
>
> this could be done at a suitable bump in API, and the command removed
> from the available list, so non-compliant editors can't reverse a way

This could be very annoying if you're making a way for an area and at 
the end suddenly remembers that you should have done it clockwise and 
not anticlockwise.

Frankly, I don't get why these left-right tags are such an issue. it 
should be just basic knowledge for the mappers that they should be very 
careful when reversing a way. It's equally important not to move nodes 
in a way around that are tagged for example, or to remember to join 
ways at junctions etc. But we don't try to work around these issues by 
not allowing nodes to move. This is all very basic understanding, but 
still somehow not everyone seems to know this... Why don't we have some 
small test to make sure mappers at least know about these fundamental 
issues before we let them do any mapping? Just a dozen questions or so 
which brings them to the attention of some easy pit-falls.

Ben