[OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Mon Jun 21 11:17:29 BST 2010


On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 6:17 AM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>Personally I don't mind if they add some sort of subjective hazard level tag as well as these objective tags, but I think the objective tags will be much more useful in the long term.
>
> +1. Please map the cause of the hazard, instead of (or at least as
> well as) a vague, subjective meta-description of a conglomeration of
> factors. If you are having trouble tagging any of these factors, e.g.
> traffic flow, let's discuss and fix that instead.

Absolutely. Tagging the actual hazards also has additional advantages
within OSM, since it's not just a bicycle project. So instead of
tagging cyclist-difficulty:2 you were to tag instead that the road is
unsurfaced, you'd be helping the OSM-inline-skaters map and their tags
would be helping you too. Or if the lanes are too narrow to allow cars
to pass bikes easily, then tagging the width of the lanes helps
improve the data for horse riders too. Or if there is heavy traffic;
well, it's easy to see who else benefits.

Specific, verifiable tags are how we organise OSM to promote
cooperation in tagging between the whole community. If we all tag
things in a bike-specific (or inline-skates specific or
horse-specific) manner then we end up with parallel tagging projects.
And we probably don't have the density of contributors to handle that
beyond a handful of specific areas.

Now as for rendering, it's very easy to pre-process the data to give
each road a "cycleability" rating on a scale of 0-5 based on all the
other attributes of the road. People do this kind of preprocessing
already, such as http://cyclestreets.net who produce their own
ratings/metric for each road using a combination of normal tags, to
great result.

Cheers,
Andy




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