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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2009/8/4 James Livingston <doctau at mac.com>:
> On 03/08/2009, at 11:23 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> 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.

you're right, it doesn't say that explicitly (any more?), and I
couldn't find it neither in the history, but I am sure (100%) that is
was there some time (last year) ago and somewhere. Maybe it was on a
different page. But I'm sure, it was explicitly written in the wiki.

> 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.

IMHO the highway-class is not about lines on the street, not even
about width, these are all relative and dependant on local habits.
It's about structuring your road-grid into different levels. From the
top-level to the smallest footpath.

> What exactly does "This tag is used for roads accessing or around
> residential areas but which are not a classified or unclassified
> highway" mean?

It means that's a road in residential areas that is less important
than unclassified, tertiary, secondary, primary, etc. according to
your local hierarchy.

> 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?
> 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?

You will probably have more traffic led through residential areas if
also other areas are tagged entirely residential and the (current)
router doesn't see the differences. You could also probably overcome
this issue with subtags like width (to introduce more "classes" on a
sublevel). IMHO the routing will work as long as the above mentioned
(hierarchy of streets) is kept. Even if you abandon all residential
and unclassified roads and start your classification from tertiary
upwards, routing will somehow work - you will simply have less
possibilities to distinguish slight differences.

> 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.

this I don't understand. Can you give me an example? I would
appreciate to have the same routing and rules allover the world, so if
there's something you would consider relevantly (in terms of routing)
different to Europe, you could name it and maybe there is a solution
to solve it.

cheers,
Martin