[OSM-talk] [RFC] highway=unclassified currently is too ambiguous, so here's my proposal to fix it.

[John Smith]

--- On Wed, 5/8/09, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> This is not how it is generally used over here (Germany)
> where the majority of people use unclassified for a road
> roughly equal to residential but without people living
> there.

I don't know about the talk-de list, just what I've seen on this list, if it mostly isn't used that way unclassified should be defined better.

> I would not hesitate to use highway=residential or
> highway=unclassified for these (or even tertiary and up if
> they are important to traffic). In fact, nobody says that a
> secondary road must be sealed! You can always add a surface
> tag to describe details.

I've marked at least one unsealed road as tertiary and there is roads less maintained/used that intersect and it makes no sense to mark most roads as tertiary or higher they just aren't that important.

Also it doesn't make sense to make them as residential, as the road is usually isn't as good as residential roads, but not as bad as tracks.

http://osm.org/go/uZ4m4qa6-

Both roads on that map link are unsealed, however one is less used/less traffic/less maintained than the tertiary road. The tertiary road is used a lot as it can save 50km from going via a sealed road so it is of some importance.