[OSM-talk] highway=track and motorcar=yes/no

[Nic Roets]

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Ben Laenen <benlaenen at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> "only"... does that mean you're going to revisit all 300000 tracks in
> Germany to check whether they allow cars or not? The project of


No. A German track without a motorcar key will get motorcar=no added,
assuming the original survey was correct. If the bot identifies itself
properly, mappers will know that no new information was introduced.


>
> dropping segments didn't have to introduce new information out of
> nowhere.


>
> World-wide only defaults and no country defaults will simply not work:
> * certain highways types have certain access rules that are different in
> each country, and they can always change later on (and as said before
> you won't be able to automagically correct those explicit tags)


It's very unlikely that a way will be affected by such a country wide
change.

It's much more likely that a way was given an incorrect highway tag. If
access restrictions are explicitly set, it may mean that the way can still
be used for routing.


> * not all countries share the same vehicle types, world-wide defaults
> cannot handle that


If we decide that highway=track defaults to snowmobile=no world-wide, then
there's no problem in snowmobileless South Africa.

If we decide that motorcycle=no defaults to moped=no world-wide, then
there's no problem in countries where moped is not defined by law.


>
> * different countries, different implicit rules on tags like
> access=destination


??


>
> * if you'd add motorcar=yes by default for each track, then where does
> it stop? bicycle=yes, foot=yes, moped=yes, motorcycle=yes... And then
> that complete set of tags for each highway in the world for each
> vehicle type there might be on this planet. Just the problem with this


This thread is about world-wide defaults, but you're now attacking the idea
of explicitly tagging restrictions on the disputed highway types.

Either way a small number of highways are affected. And explicit tags will
force casual mappers to think about other vehicle types.

Of course the problem will be reduced if we let motorcycle=yes default to
moped=yes as above.

What about the reverse : You download myregion.osm.bz2, but before you can
upload it to your GPS, you need countless polygons, wiki exports and
libraries.


>
> is that by having all this data, you actually *lose* information or
> you'd have to introduce foot=implicit_yes when it's a road that
> implicitly allows pedestrians. But in that case, you can observe the
>

Perhaps I don't understand : Either a road allows pedestrians, or it
doesn't.

If you have said JOSM preferences enabled and you want to add a track for
which you do not know if motorcars are allowed, then you can indicate this
by deleting the tag. On the one hand it's counter intuitive (you're in a
hurry and you hit enter without deleting the tag). On the other hand it may
encourage you to think even though you visited the site on foot (Did you see
a signpost, tire tracks or houses ?).
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