[OSM-talk] Misclassified roads

Steve Hill steve at nexusuk.org
Fri Jul 11 09:43:09 BST 2008


On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

> I don't want to be annoying, but what about the ordinary roads, which
> don't fit in the above classification. With houses on both side but
> limited to 50km/h for example.

Well, this is why I don't like the highway=residential tag.

> Inside housing estates sounds like
> living_street me. Maybe the word 'estate' means something else in the
> UK than I think.

The definition of living_street is a bit vague in the wiki.  A relevant 
bit seems to be:
"Simply tagging them with something like highway=residential, max_speed=7, 
motorcar=yes, motorcycle=yes, bicycle=yes"

Which implies to me that the living_street tag almost never applies in the 
UK - The vast majority of our residential roads have a speed limit of 
30mph, with newer ones tending to have a 20mph limit.  Just about the only 
roads you'll see in the UK with a 5-10mph speed limit are service roads to 
amenities such as schools.

I don't know enough about the road systems in other countries to comment - 
from your description, it sounds like maybe you have living streets (very 
low speed limit) rather than residential roads (20-30mph speed limits). 
As I said, I really don't like the residential tag (although I do use it 
in order to be consistent with the rest of the map).  For roads with speed 
limits over 30mph I don't tag them with highway=residential, even if they 
have houses along them.

> the UK and is totally meaningless elsewhere. So we denoted something
> FTLOG don't go changing them all because you think they're wrong 
> according to some classification you came up with on your own.

As I've said before, I have no intention of changing any areas I'm not 
involved with - I'm just bringing a problem to the attention of everyone 
else since I suspect that Swansea isn't the only place affected.

The roads I am retagging in Swansea are not wrong "according to some 
classification I came up with on my own" - they are wrong according to the 
definitions in the wiki - things like 50mph 2 lane dual carriageways are 
_not_ unclassified roads by any stretch of the imagination.  The problem 
is simply that highway=unclassified has been used by a lot of people as a 
general "I don't know what the classification of this road is" tag because 
up until recently there was no other tag to use for this purpose.

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

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence





More information about the talk mailing list