[OSM-talk] Mapping everything as areas

[John Smith]

I've been seeing this thread develop, and apart from trying to use
areas and relations in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways wouldn't
it be simpler from a logical point of view to treat ways as a grouping
of lanes and those lanes can be assigned tags that differ from the
ways, such as directions.

Using areas seems like a lot of work for no benefit if you just need a
simple 2 lane road that has no foot paths or other interesting
features.