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

[Roy Wallace]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Am I out of line here? Of course I want to see a globally consistent, useful
> database. But ultimately, I want to see the most number of users happy with
> their local data. And if that means tags mean something slightly different
> in Cambodia than they do in Ireland, then...what was the problem again?

Ok, let me summarise my position, before this thread derails.

I think we should aim for a globally consistent database, because
1) I travel a fair bit (I've never been to Bulgaria, but maybe someday soon)
2) I do NOT want to be limited to "Noppia-compatible" routing software
if I visit Noppia (etc.)
3) I think it's not that hard to be globally consistent - it just
comes at the cost of verbosity (which is cheap)

Adding tags that help clarify what I mean does not piss me off. I am
quite happy to add direction=clockwise to roundabouts if necessary.
Ultimately, why not aim to have direction=* applied to ALL
roundabouts? I know you have a different position, which is fine. I'm
surprised that you feel "one extra tag is a lot of extra effort" -
have you tried various editor presets, auto-complete, selecting
multiple entities before applying a tag, etc.?

For me, your example of a road tagged with:

"bicycle=yes;car=yes;bus=yes;surface=paved;smoothness=5;colour=black;lines=white;parking=parallel;lanes=2"

just looks like a very well-mapped road. "Good job", I would say to
the mapper, as they were obviously very thorough. Seriously.