[OSM-talk] Mapping everything as areas

[Teemu Koskinen]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:03:46 +0200, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> A thought occurred to me, that people are only planning to use areas
> because editors don't easily allow for widths to be entered
> graphically.
>
> I wonder how much work it would be if you could draw the way and then
> stretch it sideways to fill out the extact area you wanted covered and
> then the editor simply attaches the width of the way as a tag etc.
>


With areas you can explicitly map how neighboring ways are connected to  
each other, this is useful for sidewalks, lanes etc. If we were to map the  
ways with only simple way with a width, a relation would be needed to tell  
that you can "hop" from one way to the other, which is pretty cumbersome.  
Also the width of a way can sometimes be so variable, that you would have  
to split it in hundreds of pieces, which makes handling it very hard.

Teemu Koskinen