I agree with Pierre's description of highway=residential and highway=path. I also believe it is a good idea to tag driveways and roads to compounds as *highway=service*.
A problem I commonly see in residential areas in Africa is highway=track. It seems to be a little condescending for remote mappers to tag roads as tracks just because they don't look like residential roads in Europe or North America. Another recurring problem is highway=living_street, this tag is misleading and confusing for native English and non-native English speakers alike. If the road provides access to a couple of dwellings and doesn't connect through to other roads then *highway=service* is appropriate. One exception I suppose would be an "alley" behind houses that just goes between two other residential roads. In that case the classification is based on function due to a construction constraint (the width). Regards, Emmor On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 2:30 PM, Andrew Buck <andrew.r.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pierre's suggestions are a good guideline in general and I don't have > any disagreements with them. > > I did, however want to expand a bit on the idea of when to use service > roads, so here is that... > > I for one am in favor of additionally making liberal (but careful) use > of highway=service. > > A service road is like a residential road, but is not meant to be used > for "through traffic" but rather as the first or last leg of a longer > journey. With this in mind, I offer up the following example as a good > guideline (or case study) of how this should look in practice: > > Several years ago, I traced the roads in Ibadan, Nigeria. It was nearly > a blank map when I started so I had complete freedom in deciding how to > classify them (this was years before "highway tag africa"). I started > by just marking nearly everything as highway=residential. Then after > the whole city was mapped I spend some time just looking at the finished > map and the roads overlaid on the satellite imagery. After taking in > this "whole city view" for a while I began to see patterns in how the > roads were laid out, and these patterns suggested which roads should be > downgraded to service. > > In the case of Ibadan there are little "pocket communities" of people, > separated by streams with a few roads crossing the streams but a dense > network within each community. So after digesting the map, and seeing > how the town was structured, I decided I would downgrade all the roads > that only served to access buildings within one community, but were not > part of the routing if you were traveling outside of the community. > This lead to a marked improvement in the quality of the map, which you > can see in the two links below. Although I finished tracing all the > roads, I didn't finish all the classifications, so you can see a good > "before and after" of how much better it looks with proper use of > service roads. > > Here is a "before" section where all the roads are left as residential: > > https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/7.3354/3.9118 > > And here is an "after" section where I have downgraded local-access-only > roads to service but left the rest as residential. Notice how much more > clearly you can see the neighborhoods, and also how much easier it is to > follow a route, without having to use a route planning tool. You can > navigate just by looking at the map. > > https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/7.3933/3.9598 > > In the second example above you can actually see some areas of all > residential to the east, so there is a very clear difference between the > two sections. > > Obviously every town will be slightly different, but I think this is the > general rule we should follow: > > if you use the road mainly for accessing buildings (even if it is > a fairly large number of them) but not for long distance travel, > then the road should be downgraded to service. > > After you spend a bit of time looking at the whole town, and keeping > this rule in mind, you will get a good sense of what to downgrade. Then > it is just a matter of going through and applying it. > > Anyway, hope this all makes sense to people. I had been meaning to > write it up for a while now and this seemed like a good opportunity. > Maybe I will try to go through and finish up Ibadan, I am a lot faster > at this now than I was back then, so it wouldn't take me long. I will > leave it for the time being so it doesn't break the examples. If people > think this sounds reasonable, maybe we should grab some before and after > screenshots for the wiki to document this. > > -AndrewBuck > > > > > On 11/14/2017 03:30 PM, john whelan wrote: > > That seems very sensible. > > > > Thanks John > > > > On 14 November 2017 at 16:26, Pierre Béland <pierz...@yahoo.fr> wrote: > > > >> I we follow the Highway Tag Africa wiki page I initiated in 2013, narrow > >> highways should be evaluaed on the type of traffic possible > >> - highway= residential in residential areas if at least passable by 4 > >> wheels > >> - highway=path if only motorcycles, bicyles and foot traffic is > possible. > >> > >> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa > >> > >> The additions made to the wiki page a few months ago about the width add > >> confusion. I think that we should simply move this in a separate section > >> giving guidance on possible widths that represent the various types of > >> highways. > >> > >> regard > >> > >> Pierre > >> > >> > >> Le mardi 14 novembre 2017 16:14:22 HNE, john whelan < > jwhelan0...@gmail.com> > >> a écrit : > >> > >> > >> I'm not even sure if this is the best place to raise this but Africa > >> covers a lot of countries. > >> > >> We have some agreement on how to map highways in general Africa but > narrow > >> residential highways are a problem. I suspect highway=residential plus > a > >> width tag might be best. > >> > >> South Africa I think has local mappers who able to resolve any problems > >> but for the rest of Africa given the large number of armchair mappers > >> mapping there some guidance would be nice. > >> > >> Some mappers use highway=service generously. > >> > >> Is it possible to reach some sort of general concenus? > >> > >> Thoughts? > >> > >> Thanks John > >> _______________________________________________ > >> talk mailing list > >> talk@openstreetmap.org > >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > >> > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > talk mailing list > > talk@openstreetmap.org > > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > >
_______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
