[OSM-talk] Pedestrians on cycleways

[Stefan Monnier]

> Tagging a road as something implies certain rules, surely, and only when 
> those rules are different from the standard (for that country) should 
> you need to say so. Same as the oneway=no discussion that went on 
> previously.

All those discussions about cycleways, motorway_link, maxspeed,
etc... seem to point at the same problem: on the one hand, the authors
should need to enter as little info as possible, and as close to the "on
the ground data" as possible, which means that it should elide all the
data that's available from context (local laws and customs); and on the
other hand, users of the data want it to be in a much more regular form,
without having to worry about the customs used in any particular part of
the world.

So, I think we should split the data in the following way:
1 - the user-written data, as close as possible to what's available on
    the ground.
2 - a bunch of "locales", defined by the land they cover (typically
    countries, states, provinces, ...).
3 - a set of rules that say how to interpret the raw data for
    specific locales.
4 - A library that takes the above 3 and generates a "clean" output,
    indendent from any local laws and customs.


-- Stefan