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

[Roy Wallace]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 5:49 PM, John Smith<delta_foxtrot at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 5/8/09, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>> 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.

Hmm... Frederik has a point. John you seem to be mashing together 1)
the importance and 2) the quality ("good" vs "bad").

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But the alternative (which Frederik seems to be suggesting) would be
to use primary/secondary/tertiary/unclassified/residential solely to
address 1) the importance, and use surface + width + lanes + 4wd_only,
etc, for 2) the quality.