Is there a tag to distinct urban higways from roads between cities?

Hi all,

I am using Maperitive to build custom maps and I would like to use differente colors for a highway based in the fact that it lies inside a urban area.
Is it possible?

Abraços, Linhares

Hello from Brazil, Linhares!

No, there isn’t any. This wiki page suggests that routers are supposed to figure out if a road is urban by checking if they lie inside an area tagged with place=*.

Now, this definitely doesn’t work well for Brazil (along with many other places) where place=city (or =town, or =village, etc.) is applied to administrative boundaries. There is a proposal to tag urban areas using settlement=yes, but it’s not voted yet, looks somewhat inactive, and hasn’t been employed widely. We can try pushing this voting process on the tagging list.

But even if this gets approved, you’d still need some geometric preprocessing to discover which ways lie outside cities.

Thanks for the info, Fernando. This settlement tag is very interesting!

What means “urban area” ? does it include retails ? industries ? a “settlement” is also vague. It’ true that today we don’t have a convention to define the limits of the urban area. In earlier days, it was possible to use a simple polygon tagged with “landuse=residential” (with or without a tag “place”). But today, the single polygon is split in multiple smaller or more detailed polygons with “landuse=retail” or “commercial” or “industry” etc. The polygon for admin boundaries is of course unusable since it’s covering the whole area, including the countryside between two munipalities. What we need is a new polygon surrounding all “landuse” smaller polygons which can be defined as the “urban area”. Until then, you might also use or set the tag maxspeed to detect the urbanized area.

This is also a good tip!

What I meant, in the first place, is a tag in a specific point on the highway to say that you are approaching a urban area.
Let me use an example of the real world. Look at this board:

It says “Urban area [of the city of] Pinheiros”. It is used to alert the drivers that from this point on there is a great chance of pedestrian alongside the road and even crossing it. It is used a lot here in Brazil.
I just want to put that info on the map! Simple like that. Of course a big polygon would do, but I think that the answer could be more simple.

Abraços, Linhares

This is an interesting sign and I have not seen one before.
The equivalent for my country is probably a sign denoting the name of the locality as it is approached but this does not always acompany a speed restriction for safety. A speed restriction to 50kph on entering a built up area implies caution and pedestrians and more traffic.
An “urban” tag on the way at the site of the sign and abilty to add further info to the tag would be an important addition to the map I feel.

Hi,
maybe this tag is an option:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/trafficzone

Chris

Chris,

this is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

Abraços, Linhares

Removed

Ops, now I think this tag is more suited. From the wiki:

The zone:traffic tag ir more like a set of tags that are used together. And there has been a lot of discussion about it…

The abutter tag is a lot more easier to use! :sunglasses: Thank you all again!

Abraços, Linhares

“abutters” is more or less abandonned. It was created at the early time of OSM when only local survey from the road was possible. Today we have Bing and a polygon is much better than this tag on highways (and only there).