[OSM-talk] What's the policy on unsurveyed roads from imagery?

Steve Bennett stevagewp at gmail.com
Tue Dec 29 04:27:33 GMT 2009


On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 3:08 AM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:

>That said, I personally find the highway tagging guidelines difficult to
apply anyway.  In states without formal legal road classifications we might
as well mark everything except motorways and service roads as "road" for all
I can tell.  Anything else is just tagging for the renderer.

Definitely the worst misunderstanding of "tagging for the renderer" that
I've seen so far. If I understand you right, you see two options for
tagging: either tag everything 100% objectively based on hard facts like
speed limits and documentation, or tag completely arbitrarily. Suffice to
say there is a very healthy middle ground, where there *is* benefit in
distinguishing primary roads from tertiary from residential...even if based
on rough observation.

I guess to some extent it's a question of whether or not a street map
> database without speed limits is "good enough".  I'd say it is not.  At
> least not in the more heavily populated areas of the world.  I suppose all
> the bicyclists in OSM would disagree with that, but they don't have much use
> for primary/secondary/tertiary designations either, do they?
>

Distinctions like that are indeed important for cyclists, because they
generally prefer to avoid trunk/primary/secondary roads in favour of
tertiary/residential. You don't need to know the exact speed limit of a road
to know that trunk is faster/busier/more dangerous than residential.


> Mapping a road "the wrong color" when there aren't any traffic_calming tags
> is another great way to get people adding appropriate tags.
>

What's so important about traffic_calming tags? True, they will affect
accurate trip time planning, but is that it?

Steve
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