[OSM-talk] How to tag lanes, not ways, was: Deprecating the use of Tag:highway=stop in favour of Key:stop

[John Smith]

2009/8/30 Peter Childs <pchilds at bcs.org>:
> Another reason this is a bad idea, is that its difficult to access,
> search index and process. I think lanes need there own records, like
> ways, nodes and relations.

There would be some absolute limitations we will have to work around,
but while it would make these things easier to do I don't think that
should be the real reason we put lanes information into it's own table
separate to ways.

> We needs some way to map thinks like the pavement having 3 steps in it
> where the road is flat, and this is likly to be difficult to push
> chairs and wheel chairs and hence they need to cross the road to avoid
> the steps..... (Currently they are all on the same way and splitting
> it just gets more and more difficult to get reasonable accuracy and

I'm not sure my suggestions about lanes would fix this, since you are
tagging a physical way you would still need to split, maybe most of
the meta info could move to a relation rather than being on each
individual way segment. This is how major highways are being dealt
with, it not only reduces redundency but makes errors easier to
spot/fix.

> scale (Too much on top of each other). I'm not even sure I like the
> way we currently map dual carriageways.

Dual carriage ways are physically separated, regardless if that's a
strip of grass or by barriers so I don't see that as an issue in the
same context as being able to tag lanes individually.