On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Nathan Edgars II <nerou...@gmail.com> wrote: > John Smith wrote: >>If you wanted something more definite, police injury records could >>provide alternative verifiability, if as John pointed out 5 people >>were hurt or killed trying to cross a road than it's obviously not >>safe. > Only if you do the same for other vehicles - highway with lots of > crashes means motor_vehicle=no :) > > As others have said, foot=no when pedestrians are legally allowed is a > bad idea. As long as you walk against traffic, drivers will usually > see you, and you can easily see and get out of the way of any vehicles > unless the paved area extends all the way to the edge of the > right-of-way. The idea that one should not walk on certain roadways > where walking is legal, simply because certain drivers can't drive, is > ridiculous, and leads to legal restrictions that prohibit reasonable
Nathan, the problem is providing good routing instructions to average people. If we can't provide that we will loose people to Google Map Maker, Waze, Tom Tom etc. -- There are many reasons why a routing engine should not follow the legal definition of right of way: 1. Safety (as discussed here). 2. Permissive. Fortunately a tag was defined for it long ago. 3. An illegal barrier (gate or fence) has been erected. And you may think that this strange, but it happens frequently in South Africa. In fact, it has happened that the municipality wanted to remove one of them and the residents association obtained an injunction against the municipality on the basis that removing it will cause the crime rate to return to unacceptable levels. So sometimes it is not even possible to determine the legal status of a right of way. 4. Driving on some tracks it will cause unnecessary environmental damage, like erosion. Sometimes such an opinion is debatable, but there are cases where a clear majority of local residents feel the same way. Usually the authorities will signpost it (effectively removing the right of way), but that may not always be the case. 5. Other things that we can't forsee right now. When I map, I just want to create a useful map. And when I write software it should be backward compatible with old data and forward compatible with new data and still give reasonable results. I don't want to waste time on finding the legal status of everything. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
