[OSM-talk] Redefine the highway-key from scratch

[Ed Avis]

Konrad Skeri <konrad <at> skeri.com> writes:
>
[tagging 'admin_level' of roads instad of residential, unclassified, etc]

>Use the whole scale and omit levels so that countries with
>intermediate classifications will have a free number to use. One way
>of doing this it so use 1...100 and have 1, 10, 20, 30...100 as
>standards. If a country then has a road that lies between 40 and 50
>then use 45. If if your area has two roads between 60 and 70 then use
>63 and 66.

I hardly think this will make it easier for newcomers (or indeed old-timers)
to edit OSM.  Nobody will remember the exact number to use - is a residential
road in Belgium 42 or 57? - and every map editor will need to have a lookup
table that turns numbers into strings like 'residential', 'secondary' and so
on to present to the user.  In which case you have the same mess again, but
multiplied by the number of OSM editors available.

Is residential higher or lower than unclassified?  This argument would not
go away under your proposal.  Instead we would have long discussions about
whether it is appropriate to tag residential streets with admin_level=30
and commercial ones with admin_level=25, or whether they should both have the
same magic number, and so on and so on.  If there were any disagreement then
it would be scattered across the map, with some areas using 25 and others
using 30, and since these are just numbers with no other meaning it wouldn't
be possible to do a cleanup to recover the information of what street type
is what.

It's not like the 'layer' tag which is arbitrary, as long as one layer is
higher than another.  Road classifications do have meaning, and the fact that
classifying the meaning is difficult does not suggest we should just give up
and resort to essentially meaningless and unverifiable numbers.  (The fact
that a road is 'residential' or 'unclassified' is perhaps a little fuzzy
round the edges, but it is verifiable, whereas admin_level=45 is not verifiable
by any reference to the real world, unless by comparing to all the other
streets in the map which have the same admin_level.)

>5. A residential road would be a highway=road, abutters=residental or
>a highway=road passing through landuse=residential area. This allows
>for different grade residential roads. Eg.
>http://osm.org/go/0ex4n1HM?layers=B000TTF - Östra Kyrkogatan is a
>residential road (apartments with doors directly facing the street),
>but at the same time it's the main drive-through road of the area.

This makes some sense.

>And finally - this is not a super-serious proposal. Just giving you
>something to think about.

Ah, ok.

I hope I've explained why using numbers is not really the way to go, unless
those numbers can be verified in the real world.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>