[OSM-talk] tagging roads

[John Smith]

--- On Sun, 2/8/09, Blaž Lorger <blaz.lorger at triera.net> wrote:

> Unfortunately lanes only specifies number of lanes. In
> general every road that 
> is not one way has at least 2 lanes, even if it is narrow,
> say 3.5 meters.

Even one way roads can have multiple lanes. Like dual carriage ways :)

> Some good practices 
> on how to accurately estimate road width could also came
> handy.

I feel you could get road widths accurately enough based simply on the number of lanes and the type of highway.

For example, a residential road with 2 lanes, one in each direction is usually about 6-7m wide.

Motorways are usually the numbers of lanes times 3m + 3m each side of the road way to allow for break downs, or maybe you could even have lanes=* breakdown_lanes=* to make this more accurate, but in any case a 3 lane motorway will be about 15m wide (3 * 3 + 3 + 3).