I'm seeking advice as to best practice in the following type of situation:
 
As an increasingly common example, now that people are getting around to 
mapping areas such as leisure=, natural= and landuse= ...
 
Consider the case of landuse=farm on one side of a highway (say a secondary 
road) and leisure=golf_course on the other side of the highway. The easiest way 
to map this - and the one usually adopted it seems - is to make the boundaries 
of the farm and the golf course both coterminous with the highway so that the 
three lines are superimposed in the editors (not quite sure how the various 
renderers handle this) and the representation of the highway has zero width.
 
There are, however, potential problems with this (quite apart from the slightly 
clumsy editing when several ways are superimposed) where detailed mapping would 
ideally show that in real life the golf course and the farm do not in fact have 
a common boundary but both are, for example, separated by hedges (which may or 
may not be mapped) from the road.
 
It is clearly possible to map the farm and the golf course as separated areas 
with the road mapped as a line drawn between them - i.e. the mapping has three 
separate parallel lines. This assists with mapping more clearly features such 
as junctions of paths with the road (and stiles on paths at such junctions). 
But is this unduly messy or does it create rendering issues (e.g. if the lines 
are not absolutely parallel and just far enough apart to render with random 
gaps between, say, the golf course and the road.
 
The situation is even trickier where, say, a farm has been mapped as a single 
area (same land use) with, say, a road crossing it - whereas in practice, this 
is two separate farms - one on each side of the road - that may at some stage 
need to be named separately. Then we have to go back and split the area, etc.
 
This seems to be a quite a generic issue and I am wondering how people see the 
pros and cons of (a) the simple approach with coterminous lines giving a 
notional zero width to the highway, vs. (b) the more precise approach of 
mapping the areas either side of the highway as areas that are separate both 
from each other and from the highway.
 
In practice, almost all mapping seems to use approach (a) - but would approach 
(b) be easier for subsequent editing and addition of detail, and rather clearer 
as it avoids superimposed ways and potential editing errors?
 
Views?
 
Mike Harris
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