Guillaume, You can find descriptions of what the different road types are on the wiki. Go to the main wiki page, click on map features, and scroll down to Highway. Or go straight to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features#Highway That has a brief description of what the road type is. If you click on the road type ("motorway" or "path") there's a more detailed description, including how to map. The reverse of how to map is more or less how to read.
None of the categories are hard-and-fast, and especially since it's a user-generated map, your mileage on each road in your car may vary. Off the top of my head though, "footway", "path" and "pedestrian" probably won't take vehicles; "track" may only be suitable for 4-wheel drive vehicles; and in rural areas "driveway" and "residential" may not be free to access. "unclassified" may be tagged that way because the mapper didn't know the nature of the road. All the other roadtypes look driveable to me. Aspen (eulochon) > Hello all, > > I have a follow-up question to my earlier newbie question regarding getting > the shapefiles. I now have them (thanks!) and am working on interpreting the > "highway" (contains all roads) shapefile. > > Below is the list of road-types contained in the shapefiles (18 different > categories in all). > > Where can I find information that defines what all of these terms mean? > Specifically, I just need to know which roads can be driven on, and which > cannot. > > Thanks again, > Guillaume > > "highway" types = > 'residential' > 'track' > 'trunk' > 'secondary' > 'motorway_link' > 'primary' > 'service' > 'motorway' > 'tertiary' > 'footway' > 'unclassified' > 'primary_link' > 'trunk_link' > 'secondary_link' > 'path' > 'Driveway' > 'pedestrian' > 'road' > > --- > http://www.mauger.org/guillaume > _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
