[OSM-talk] residential and unclassified in Australia WAS definition of the main highway-tag

[James Livingston]

On 03/08/2009, at 11:23 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> 2009/8/3 James Livingston <doctau at mac.com>:
>> In any case, if you have a router that does this kind of thing,
>> wouldn't it be better to base it off landuse=residential/industrial?
>
> the problem is, that it is far more timeconsuming to check this for
> all roads instead of having the information already avaible as such.

It'd probably take a bit longer to convert from the OSM data to  
whatever format your router actually uses, but it also means you could  
treat roads in other landuse areas differently too.


> well, tag whatever you like, I just can tell you, that the definiton
> in the wiki says for residential, that there must be at least at one
> side residences.

The highway=residential wiki page doesn't directly say that, but may  
imply it. The problem is that a lot of the words used seem to be based  
on the British way of defining roads and that doesn't necessarily  
translate into non-British English very well, let alone into other  
languages (as seen in some of the other discussions).

Most of the Highway page talks about British road classifications, and  
things like "(tertiary) In the UK, they tend to have dashed lines down  
the middle, whereas unclassified roads don't", which doesn't really  
help people figure out how it is supposed to apply to other countries.


What exactly does "This tag is used for roads accessing or around  
residential areas but which are not a classified or unclassified  
highway" mean? If you take 'highway' to be a synonym for 'road' then  
suburban residential streets shouldn't be tagged like that because  
they are unclassified. If it's not a synonym, then how do industrial  
streets get tagged, because they're not highways.


In addition the "Australian Tagging Guidelines" (which Liz mentioned  
were written a year before the residential page) explicitly disagree  
with the residential page.

Which brings us around to one of the major questions in this argument.  
If the consensus (which may exist in Europe, but I'm far from certain  
is global) is to use one definition, but within a region there is a  
consensus to use a different definition, what do people want to happen?


> If you don't care about this definition, do as you
> like. You'll IMHO loose a datum and gain nothing.

There are other ways of storing that data (e.g. landuse) and roads in  
Australia aren't tagged according to the highway=residential wiki page  
at the present time, so what exactly do we lose?

We might not be able to use exactly the same routing settings as in  
Europe, but I'm pretty certain they are never going to work as-is  
anyway, simply because things are different over here.