Interesting proposal on the OSM Tagging list. Oz would have a unpaved/paved ratio as higher that most countries, we should have an opinion on this.
So far, reaction has been mixed, some (including myself) welcoming it and some seeing it as a duplicate of surface= Comments folks ? David On Sat, 2014-09-20 at 23:42 +0200, Tomasz Kaźmierczak wrote: > Hello all, > > I've posted the below message on the forum, and have been directed > from there to this mailing list, thus re-posting it. > > Idea > > I would like to suggest making the paved key for highways (and > probably other types of elements) official. Taginfo for paved: > http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/paved#values > > The above shows that the key is already being used, but the Wiki > doesn't describe this key, instead redirecting Key:paved to the > article about Key:surface. > > Rationale > > Currently, the surface key is being used as a way of saying that a > given highway is paved or unpaved, but often the value for the surface > key is not a generic paved or unpaved, but a specific surface type is > given.This is of course very useful for describing the particular > surface type a given highway has. However, in some cases, a simple > information on just whether a highway is paved or not, would be very > useful. One such case would be navigation software – if a user chooses > to avoid unpaved roads, the software can check the value of the > surface key, but in practice most (all?) of the navigation software > only checks for a subset of all the possible values the surface key > can have. This leads to incorrect (in terms of what the user expects) > navigation when, for example, the surface is set to some value that > describes an unpaved road, not recognized by the navigation software – > if the software assumes that all highways are paved, unless explicitly > stated otherwise (by recognized values of known keys), then, in > consequence, it assumes that the road in question is paved. > > If the paved key was widely used, then the navigation software would > have a simple and clear way of checking whether a given road is paved > or not. The default value of the paved key for highways could be yes, > so that it would be consistent with the assumption that highways in > general are paved. > > I don't mean that we should stop using the paved and unpaved values > for the surface key – I'm sure those generic values are useful in some > cases. However, using the paved key would be also very useful. Also, > the surface=paved could also implicate paved=yes and similarly > surface=unpaved could implicate paved=no, so that duplication of the > information could be avoided when the generic paved and unpaved values > are set for the surface key. > > I believe that adding an article for the paved key to the Wiki would > encourage people to use this tag, and navigation software makers to > implement support for it in their applications. > > What do you think about that? > > > > Regards, > > Tomek > > _______________________________________________ > Tagging mailing list > tagg...@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au