[OSM-talk] Unknown road classifications

[Chris Hill]

Steve Hill wrote:
> When adding roads, you don't always know what classification of road it 
> is (e.g. primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, etc).  Quite a lot 
> of people seem to add these sorts of roads as highway=unclassified, with 
> the idea that these can be fixed in the future when the status of the 
> road is discovered, but this is wrong since "unclassified" is a real 
> road classification.
>
> Is there a recommended way of tagging these roads?  Leaving them 
> untagged has a couple of problems: there is no way to later determine 
> that the way is a road if it is left completely untagged, and the road 
> doesn't get rendered.
>
> It seems silly to take the attitude that this data shouldn't be rendered 
> until it is complete - the submitter probably knows lots of useful data 
> about the way, such as that it is a road which is accessible to cars, 
> the actual classification of the road isn't really as important as 
> knowing it is there and that you can drive down it.
>
> Having a highway=unknown_road or similar would also help with people 
> tracing yahoo images - render them in a lighter colour so it is obvious 
> that the road hasn't been fully mapped.  There are probably 2 groups of 
> users who want different things from OSM in this regard:  Mappers want 
> to be able to easilly see which bits of the map are complete, so having 
> roads which haven't had a proper survey tagged as such is helpful.  Map 
> users want as complete a map as possible - knowing that there hasn't 
> been a proper survey is useful, but seeing a road with questionable 
> accuracy is often more useful than no road at all
Use your best guess of the type of road and add a tag: "fixme=not sure 
of the classification".  There is a proposal to display fixme tags in 
potlatch to help find them later.