Length * Width - where road width is measured, use that, where it isn’t, use a sensible default based on the road type.
To calculate the proportion of a residential area that is made up of roads? I dunno I wouldn’t make assumptions about how the data is used, I’d just make it as useful as possible. What are you using the data for?
Note that traditionally residential roads are considered to be part of residential land use, too - at least in the UK - so you would be deviating from that norm EDIT: apparently that changed
Residential areas, including all dwellings, gardens and outbuildings, but EXCLUDING all access roads, pavements paths and verges and any other surrounding infrastructure
Seems to mostly align with cost-saving measures rather than data quality, but aligning with the government’s definition would be a good reason to map this way. EDIT2: and now they seem to have stopped collecting it at all? Wonderful
EDIT3-Final.xlsx: but the change in approach did seem to then align with the original edits :
I believe width= refers only to the physical carriageway width - not including sidewalks and green buffers, so you’d still have to approximate those parts
Well I believe you can do this now. If you define an area, you can see the exact percentage of land dedicated to residential retail etc… (can’t remember the name of the site that shows this with pie charts) currently any land dedicated to roads will show up as unknown… maybe I need to add lots of landuse=highway
Thank you David Cameron for backing me up on this one
Although I certainly wouldn’t divide up landuse with as much granularity as in that screenshot - things like shared paths, shared driveways and the grassy areas around apartment blocks/council houses I would all include within residential areas.
Unironically, if you’re mapping like this, I would yeh. But then you probably don’t want to stick the polygons together, so you’d still have gaps. Hmm.
I can’t believe you’ve brought austerity into our fair map smh
Why would I not connect them together? I wouldn’t leave any gaps between landuse=residential and landuse=highway… (not the same as area:landuse=residential
I was surprised to see that mentioned - I think that it’s fair to say that the use of that tag is at best “fairly uneven” - as an example look at usage in the southern UK.
There is nothing wrong with not mapping land uses (leaving blank spaces) - we are trying to provide useful information, not colour the map. If there is something of interest for you to map - go for it, but don’t feel compelled to put something there just because the area is empty.
To me the whole discussion is about de jure zoning regulations vs actual land uses. In my opinion calling a residential road a residential landuse is a stretch. It does not function as a residential area and it is serving residents in the same way as nearby supermarkets, sewage processing plants or district power plants do.
From purely practical point of view, it is rare to find truly residential areas. Even in new-built areas there are exceptions (publicly available parks etc). Typical villages, towns have hundreds retail/commercial/religious/administrative amenities all over the place, often served by “residential” roads.
BTW, coastal areas are fun: OpenStreetMap. Patchwork of residential, commercial and anything in between areas. The only way of mapping them is sticking to on the ground truth principle and map each property as it is.
I don’t think it’s really about de jure vs facts on the ground - rather, it’s about whether you consider roads, which only/mainly provide access for residents, to be “land used for residential purposes”. A good measure may be “if we knocked down the surrounding houses, would we still keep this road”.
I think this might undermine the “residential is only houses” argument.
I should add that I don’t feel super strongly about this because ultimately I don’t think anyone is using this data for anything; it certainly does not cause problems e.g. with routing. My strongest opinion is reserved for retail areas, which I think should include all the related infrastructure (parking, roads, etc) that form a single, cohesive “shopping area”. But even then, it doesn’t seem to have a meaningfully degrading effect (the map might look a bit confusing and not really match the facts on the ground but people can put two and two together).
Are there consumers of this data (other than for pretty rendering) which do have opinions on it?
I wouldn’t make assumptions about how the data is used, I’d just make it as useful as possible. What are you using the data for?
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