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

[John Smith]

--- On Wed, 5/8/09, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> 'Urban' areas should on the whole be covered by
> 'residential' or 'service' in 
> between the 4 main vehicle route tags. Although personally
> I'd prefer that 
> motorway service roads were not grouped with 'industrial'.
> 'shopping' may have 
> a place for filling in the gaps in these cases, but I do
> not see any reason 
> that 'unclassified' would be used within an urban area?

The problem is the definition on the wiki is ambiguous enough that people took it to mean that it interconnects with residential streets, and at the same time they took residential streets to imply access=destination so they needed some what to distinguish and that's when the problem started.

If they had marked the residential streets as access=destination instead, and used residential without the access restriction there wouldn't be the conversation we're having now.

> This leaves tertiary and unclassified for those roads
> outside urban areas and 
> on the whole tertiary probably applies better leaving
> unclassified for roads 
> such as farm tracks or routes where the vehicular usage may
> be questionable. 
> Certainly an 'unclassified' highway should not be capable
> of handling a large 
> lorry so routes for access to farms should be tagged
> 'service' perhaps where 
> such access is practical, and 'track' needs to be tidied in
> the same context?

Unfortunately that's not how everyone sees it, it really depends on what you're used to as to how you take the meaning of the current wiki definition.

> I think I could well make a case for a 'way' having a
> 'highway', 'cycleway' 
> and 'footway' tag if appropriate, so American motorways
> that have cycle access 
> would simply add a 'cycleway' tag with separate linking
> ways if appropriate?

If a bike can legally go somewhere it should be tagged as such for the bike routing software to figure it all out :)