On 18.04.2018 05:03, Andrew Harvey wrote: > highway, surface, maxspeed, maxweight, maxheight, width, oneway, access, > lanes, turn:lanes, lit, parking:lane:left, parking:lane:right, > parking:condition:left, parking:condition:right,parking:lane:left:type, > parking:lane:right:type, etc.
The percentage of roads tagged with all these details is vanishingly small, and will likely remain so for at least another decade. At the level of detail that's realistically achievable in the medium term, sidewalk tags make a lot of sense: They're easy to use for the common case (where sometimes not even the existence of sidewalks is mapped yet), and still allow for micromapping in pockets of unusually high data quality. > I realise editors can and do abstract some of this, but if we can put > all those sidewalk attributes on their own ways it makes it much easier > to map by reducing the complexity of the highway centerline. Comparing the mapping styles solely based on ease of mapping would only make sense if separate ways were able to express the same information contained in sidewalk tags. That's not the case, though: With separate sidewalk ways, it's impossible (in the general case) to figure out which road section that sidewalk way belongs to. Not having this basic information available makes separately mapped sidewalks unusable for entire categories of applications – sometimes leading to worse outcomes than not having the sidewalk mapped at all. And while you could fix that issue with relations, this would clearly not be easier for mappers than using sidewalk tags is. As for the original question: sidewalk=separate seems like an attempt to solve the aforementioned issue, but it does not actually achieve this goal – it only tells you that *some* sidewalk way belongs to this section of road, but does not help you to find out *which* sidewalk way that is. As such, it's not a very useful tag, and not a compelling reason to map asymmetric real-world situations in a symmetric way. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
