[OSM-talk] Mapping everything as areas

[Anthony]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Teemu Koskinen <teemu.koskinen at mbnet.fi> wrote:
> 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.

Without good editor support, mapping highways as areas is already
quite cumbersome.  I guess you could use the "parallel way" feature in
potlatch, or whatever the equivalent is in JOSM.  But then you still
have a quite a few steps after that.  And if you're mapping
side-by-side areas, you're going to probably want to use a
multipolygon/boundary relation anyway, in order to make that
connection explicit and in order to save yourself from lots of
unnecessary duplication.

That said, you raise an interesting solution to mapping lanes.  If you
mapped each lane as a multipolygon/boundary relation, you could even
add tags to the shared ways which detail what type of lane changes are
allowed.

Since you're using a relation anyway, you could add some tags which
help to indicate direction.  Instead of "outer" and "inner" you could
tag the ways as "left", "right", and "end".  Then you have a direction
with which to use oneway=yes.

All of this would have to be hidden by the editors, of course.