[OSM-talk] Misclassified roads

Steve Hill steve at nexusuk.org
Thu Jul 10 09:41:42 BST 2008


On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, David Earl wrote:

> We've gone round and round the issue of what road classification means many 
> times before. With a few dissenters, the consensus has generally been that 
> you tag what you find on the ground. This sometimes contradicts the 
> "official" classification. Some people who have had access to this 
> information have used different tags to apply the "official" classification 
> (though I do wonder about the copyright status of such information).

You misunderstand the problem - the problem isn't that the classification 
on OSM doesn't match the official classification.  The problem is that 
until highway=road was approved, there was no classification for "it's a 
road but I can't remember what type", so people have used 
highway=unclassified so that the road at least gets rendered.  This means 
that most roads tagged as highway=unclassified are most definately not 
unclassified roads "on the ground" - they are residential, tertiary, 
secondary or even primary roads.

If a road is tagged as highway=unclassified, it should be a relatively 
narrow road - it should not be a wide residential road with houses down 
both sides, or a dual carriageway.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence





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