[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 JigPu <killertofu at gmail.com>:

> I understand why you feel that using a way+node relation or way+direction
> tag may be a hack, but "children" are also a hack. Children not only only a
> single problem (that of a way being asked to take on additional metadata
> that really belongs to only a portion of the way) but solves it by poorly
> duplicating relations! Relations are capable of modeling the same
> parent-child relationship you desire and exist precicely to relate many
> pieces into a whole.

While relations may already exist, I don't see how they would be the
best method to handle this, since ways are children of relations,
relations aren't children of ways.

> I'm not saying that the "lane and lane group" proposal is perfect either. In
> my opinion it abuses relations so as not to upset the status quo too much.
> Personally I think
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Collected_Ways does a
> much better job of using relations correctly. Multiple sub-ways are related
> to each other, with the relation holding the generic tags and sub-ways
> containing any overriding information. If renderers supported it, it'd be
> the ideal way of representing "child" ways.

I disagree, I think this is another hack to try and make lanes without
making lanes, we need to stop thinking about what we can do in the
current framework and do come up with real solutions, and using
relations for this purpose is a ugly ugly way to do it.

> Somewhat tangentally, while finding the Collected Ways proposal I stumbled
> across the "enforcement" relation. It's an "approved" use of relations and
> acts almost identically to the stop relation proposal. Though this doesn't
> mean it's not a hack, it does indicate that the community seems to be ok
> with using relations in the way proposed.

I never said relations couldn't be used for this purpose, however I
don't think it's the best way to do it, and just because 20 or 30
people agreed with a proposal doesn't make it the best solution
either, just look at the mess highway=path caused and 20 or 30 people
agreed with it too.