[OSM-talk] [tagging] Road crossings proposal - status?

[Andy Allan]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Steve Hill <steve at nexusuk.org> wrote:

>  2. If the road is on the map it becomes much easier for people who are
> familiar with the area to fill in the details such as the name - no
> equipment is needed (such as GPS), they don't need to get off their backside
> and go out to walk/drive the road and there is next to no effort in putting
> a name on a road if you know the area.

Maybe you misunderstood me. I've no problem with people who are
familar with an area tracing over the Yahoo! imagery. As I see it,
there are the following steps, with arbitary "difficulty" values

* Tracing a road from the imagery (0.1)
* Getting the connectivity right (15)
* Naming the streets right (30)
* Putting in some POIs (30)

I think the difference in difficulty between tracing a road from
yahoo, and fixing the connectivity when someone has ballsed it up,
means that it's a waste of time tracing when you've got no intention
of fixing the connectivity (for routing) or names (for maps) or POIs
(the added special sauce that makes OSM megauseful).

Now we have different results for areas, which are genuinely useful
when taken from imagery, and very hard to mess up. But for roads it's
just not worth it.

I'm also of the belief that missing roads doesn't hinder the "drop in
mappers" from tracing two roads and naming them, whereas vast swathes
of traced roads has had a noticeable impact on our ability to finish
off large cities like london, by getting in the way of serious mappers
and giving the false impression that it's mostly done already.

Cheers,
Andy