On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Dave F. <[email protected]> wrote: > On 18/08/2010 05:33, Alan Millar wrote: >> I agree. The "highway" tag always designates the primary usage. > > I absolutely disagree with that statement. > > The highway tag is used to define the *classification* of a way, not the > "primary" usage, whatever that means. > > For instance, in the UK you could have highway=trunk. Motorized vehicles, > bicycles & pedestrians are all allowed to use that way. Even though cars > maybe the majority users, they *all* have equal rights to use it.
A better example would be a cul-de-sac that provides access to one driveway and the end of a popular bike trail. Even though there will be more bikes than cars using the road, we still tag it highway=residential. (It's also worth noting Alan's unstated assumption that most values of highway imply motor vehicle use; in reality most of the specific values are geared towards importance in a motor vehicle network, but none of them says anything about the primary use.) Perhaps it's best to think of the cycleway tag as a newspeak term for anything cycle-related, whether properly called a cycleway. A street with an unmarked narrow strip becomes a cycleway=lane when signs are posted or symbols are painted. A street becomes a cycleway=sharrow when symbols are painted. It might have been better had we used cycle rather than cycleway as the tag, but we're probably stuck. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
