I recently purchased a laser distance meter, primarily for measuring road widths so as to allow better routing for various vehicles. In the process, I discovered that some roads can have a gradually decreasing/increasing width. The wiki does not cover such situations, so I brought it up in the #osm IRC channel.
Some mappers (and the wiki) advise that one should map the width at the narrowest part of the street. However, this is not always desirable. If a vehicle can enter a street up to a certain point to reach an address or POI, sufficiently smart routers should (given sufficient data) route it along the street accordingly. For such situations, I liked pbnoxious' suggestion of using the keys width:start and width:end, applied to the concerned way. In addition, pbnoxious suggested using width=* to specify the mean/median width. By splitting ways and using width:start=* + width:end=*, complex changes in width can be mapped. A question was raised about how such a width should be rendered. Personally, rendering a gradually increasing/decreasing width is not too important for my uses, but can be nice to have in more detailed renderers. If there are no objections, I'll add a section about the above to the wiki. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
