[OSM-talk] Misclassified roads

[Chris Hill]

Steve Hill wrote:
> Following the approval of the highway=road tag, I've set about 
> aggressively changing a lot of the highway=unclassified roads around 
> Swansea, that I believe are misclassified, to highway=road, with the 
> intention that they can then be surveyed and reclassified correctly.
>
> However, after starting to do this, I've realised just how many of the 
> roads are misclassified - I'd estimate that well over 80% of the roads 
> tagged as highway=unclassified are, infact, not unclassified roads.  So 
> I'm wondering about the merits of changing *all* the 
> highway=unclassified roads in the area to highway=road so that the whole 
> lot can be classified appropriately from scratch.  This would make it 
> obvious which roads really are unclassified and which need to be checked.
>
> What are peoples' views on this?  I imagine that much of the OSM world is 
> affected in the same way, and this renders the highway=unclassified tag 
> relatively meaningless in it's current state.  Should there be a global 
> reclassification to fix this, or is there a better way?
I would be strongly against a global change of highway=unclassified - 
all of the roads I have tagged as unclassified deserve to be so.  I have 
been working partly on a very rural area, where many of the roads are 
unclassified (country lanes).  To have to retag them from road to 
unclassified would be a very annoying waste of time. 

Cheers, Chris