[OSM-talk] When is a road a secondary road and when is it not?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Peter Miller wrote:
> Personally I want a structure for the town which tells a story 
> about today's road use, rather than a dusty document in a 
> council. I should inform routing engines to keep cars on 
> major roads and cyclists off them.

I don't dispute that this information would be valuable - to draw a
cartographic analogy, that's absolutely what Michelin maps do, though the
fact they're the only ones in the UK to do so might tell you something!

But nonetheless the existing use of the highway= tag in the UK is understood
by 95% of UK mappers and it's not helpful to have a little island of "we do
things differently here" in Ipswich. So you should (I would almost go as far
as to say "must") use another tag for this. Personally, I would love to see
the use of tags like traffic=low - it would be hugely useful for determining
cyclable roads.

More generally, over the next year, we're going to be seeing a lot more
custom rendering (a la CM Style Editor), on-the-fly rendering (see Cartagen
and Potlatch 2), and configurable routing engines (everywhere). So the
barrier against having a new tag is much, much less. "Tagging for the
renderers" basically isn't needed any more: you use the tag you want and the
client that responds to it.

Followups on the UK-specific point to talk-gb, I suspect.

cheers
Richard
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