[OSM-talk] definition of the main highway-tag

[John Smith]

--- On Tue, 4/8/09, Richard Mann <richard.mann.westoxford at googlemail.com> wrote:

> The potential problem for renderers is that
> there's a lot less space to render things in urban
> areas, so they benefit if lower-order roads are
> distinguishable between urban areas (so they can be narrowed
> or suppressed), and rural areas (so they can be used to help
> fill up the space). Abutters seems to offer one way of
> indicating to the renderer that it's within the urban
> area without creating yet another highway tag.

The problem with that is it would require abutters tags and/or be ambiguous as to what class of highway it is, I also don't think it's a very good idea using one class of highway for 2 very different purposes.

Some people are using highway=unclassified to mean a wider than residential road which seems to contradict the wiki reference:

"No administrative classification. Unclassified roads typically form the lowest form of the interconnecting grid network."

This means to me to mean lower than residential, but the opposite has been used and some take it as higher than residential.