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

[John Smith]

2009/8/31 Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>:

> +1 - I agree with Tobias and Anthony. John, I know you feel that
> solving the "lane" problem will solve the "stop sign" problem (indeed
> it might), but the stop sign problem *can be solved independently* (by
> indicating the direction or the junction to which it applies), and is
> a simpler problem to solve - so I think we should go ahead with this
> and vote for either the use of a way+node relation or a node+direction
> tag to denote a stop sign (I vote for relation for several reasons).

Which is a hack, it solves one issue out of many, it would be much
better to solve most if not all of the many problems with a single
solution. Coming up with a bunch of hacks that solve them independent
of each other is going to be very bad for consistency.

> John, perhaps we're missing something. Why do you want to add more
> tables to the DB? I don't see why you think using a relation is a
> "hack". You said, "just like a relation joins multiple ways, a way

Because there is numerous problems that need to be solved, stop signs
is just one of them, if we can tag things in lanes it would solve a
good deal of them.

> [should join] multiple lanes." From the wiki: "relations are basically
> groups of objects in which each object may take on a specific role."

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Relations_are_not_Categories

> This sounds suitable for what you're suggesting. Have you seen
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/lane_and_lane_group,
> for example?

That sounds more or less what I had in mind, yes, except the example
osm file used relations acting as children of the way almost, why
can't ways simply have children of their own instead of using
relations?

This diagram explains a common way, it looks like it has 2 lanes for
through traffic, 2 parking lanes and a footway

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/images/4/46/Lane_group_example1_screen_2.png