[OSM-talk] Street Complete

[Mark Wagner]

On Fri, 2 Jun 2017 14:20:31 +0100
Chris Hill <osm at raggedred.net> wrote:

> I have just been encouraged to look at Street Complete by some odd
> notes I saw.
> 
> I installed it to find out what the app does. I was prompted at some 
> point for my OSM credentials, which I now regret.
> 
> The app shows my local area plastered with questions about the road 
> surface. In the UK residential roads are generally metalled. Are we 
> really going to add a surface tag to every UK residential road? 

> It also pointed out a few very short link connections with no name.
> That is sensible to me, why would a short (<10m ) link road have a
> name? When double confirmed that the road has no name, it added
> noname=yes to the road using my credentials, again without telling me.
> 
> These seem to be unnecessary tagging.

"Usually" is not the same as "always".  The lack of a surface tag on a
road could indicate that the road has the default surface for the area,
or it could indicate that nobody's bothered to see what sort of surface
it has.  Maybe the UK has managed to pave *all* its residential roads,
but here in the US, even major urban areas have the occasional unpaved
road; by explicitly marking even the normal case, it makes it clear
which roads have an unknown surface type.

The same thing goes for those short link roads: sometimes they take the
name of the main road, sometimes they get their own name (locally,
"<main road> Wye"), and sometimes they don't have any name at all.
Explicitly marking the lack of name makes it clear which is the case,
where a simple lack of a name could also mean "I don't know".

-- 
Mark