>> Using areas seems like a lot of work for no benefit if you just need a >> simple 2 lane road that has no foot paths or other interesting >> features. > > Are you saying that you wouldn't find mapping areas satisfying? If so, > that's fine - you don't have to. > > But for people who want to do it, they should be able to. That's what > this thread is about - giving them a way to map the world more > accurately, if that's what they're into. > There's nothing stopping anyone mapping highways as areas.
However, it could be a long time until routers and renderers catch up; the majority of the world wouldn't be able to position the areas accurately enough to make this worthwhile; GPS errors approaching the size of some roads; no suitable aerial imagery; lack of time to get the theodolite out everywhere... For renderers: * nearly all maps exaggerate road width except when really zoomed in. A 30-35 metre wide motorway would appear almost insignificant at z levels less than 10 or 12 - but this is precisely the opposite of what we'd want; motorways should be significant roads when zoomed out. You'd have to find a way of expanding the areas to make these more significant. For routers: * routing over areas is much harder than routing along ways between nodes. Directions are not defined so one-ways are meaningless. You could do routing over areas, with some pre-processing, but it would 'break' a number of existing established routers In summary, I have no problem with people mapping everything as areas; however, I believe for the moment we will have to use both areas and ways. Most wide rivers mapped as areas I've seen also have a way down the centreline - to define the river name, and direction of flow. More importantly, using both ways and areas would render the way we'd expect; wider when zoomed out because the way is rendering wider than the area; wider when zoomed in because we are seeing the visible extent of the area, and we can have street names rendered in the right direction down the centreline. For routers we can continue to follow the ways as "navigation paths", ignoring areas, and we can define the direction of travel for one-way streets. Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
