[OSM-talk] [tagging] updated RFC: Highway administrative and physical descriptions

[Alex Mauer]

Andy Robinson (blackadder) wrote:
> It's a whole lot easier to add additional tags that are logical and describe
> the physical properties of the highway specifically. For the physical you

I disagree that it's a whole lot easier.  As you mention below, "who 
wants to spend hours adding 20 tags to each piece of road".  Much better 
IMO to have a tag which can "shorthand" those twenty tags.  Just need to 
figure out how best to give a general idea of the road physically, 
without the need to break out the tape measures.

> You can do the same for administrative designations that go beyond the
> simple highway= approach we started with. These don't supersede the existing
> tags, they simply add to the overall definition of the object.

That's exactly what I'm going for here.  For example, highway=secondary 
tells nothing at all about the road, besides that it is at a lower level 
(in some way, administratively or physically) than a primary, trunk, or 
motorway.

This proposal allows a basic description of the physical road (from a 
glance) and also (hopefully) gives a way to indicate the administrative 
designation, in a way that can be used globally (perhaps with slight 
modification at some point to add a level or two)