[OSM-talk] Path vs footway vs cycleway vs...

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Richard Fairhurst
<richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>
> Cartinus wrote:
>> It's fairly simple to put foot=no on all cycleways in what is probably
>> the only country with rules for cycleways that are so strict.
>
> Indeed.

Yeah, but from the point of view of a resident of that country, doing
the mapping..."why should I put 'foot=no' on every cycleway? that's so
redundant!"

I have a similar issue with the suggestion that I'm supposed to mark
every mini_roundabout "direction=clockwise". I refuse. Some day the
renderers and routers will get smart enough to figure out that EVERY
mini_roundabout goes clockwise in this country, and every other
left-drive country.

So do we just need a more managed approach to interjurisdictional
variation? We have some ad hoc tables for things like freeways. Why
not make this approach more structured, and possibly encoded, so that
we can use plain old "cycleway" in different countries, and have a
table that explains to routers what that means?

Currently the definitions on each page are very vague, as they try and
capture commonalities across all countries, even though actual
practice is more specific.

Steve