Which is why ideally highway=road be used instead but let’s ignore that here. If we accept that there’s just a subgroup of road tagging in the highway key (which by the way, is all of the tags used on non-closed ways), it makes no sense to base this value on two different things. Other tags—for nodes and areas—are totally fine and because all of them are related to highways, there nothing wrong with them. I have no idea who likes these posts.
2 Likes
If I’m understanding you correctly, rivers, barriers, fences, walls, cliffs, coastlines, and probably a bunch of other things would like a word. But I might just be misunderstanding you.
While I’m chiming in here, I’d just like to add that I think the flexibility and different interpretations of the same values across regions and nations is one of the key capabilities in OpenStreetMap’s success. Trying to improve clarity and understanding where there are features that are aligned but tagged differently is good, but trying to find a uniform schema in a world where things aren’t uniform but where they may fill a similar function is impossible.
The adaptability of the tagging system to match different legal systems, engineering designs, and planning is one of the best things about OSM.
I don’t think the different interpretations of the same tag are a problem. My hot take it’s that this project probably wouldn’t have taken off internationally and wouldn’t still be relevant if it couldn’t do that.
6 Likes
You’re not. We’re all talking about highway=*.
I really don’t know why you would think that. Everywhere where ambiguity pops up, it’s criticised. It really makes routers not know what a certain road really means and to a viewer who has no idea what an openstreetmap is, they don’t know what the colour of a road means and they have to guess. A great example is newbies doing edits or anonymous notes talking about how a road should be of a different colour because administratively it doesn’t line up.
If the road tagging is so great, why not add railway=primary?
It is really amazing to watch how much (some parts of) the OpenStreetMap community can bikeshed about something that is almost completely irrelevant. Two threads, over 300 messages. Incredible.
Of course I’m totally in favor of everybody spending their spare time as they wish, but I think it is good to keep in mind that there is a silent majority (that until five minutes ago, I myself was also a part of) that wisely decides to stay out of all the fruitless “let’s change all the tags” threads[1] and just wants to keep things as they are.
(Edit: Oops, sorry, I didn’t see the last posting date and did not intend to revive a 8-day-old thread. Thanks Discourse for clearly showing the “8 days later” thing only after posting… I think this may also be one reason these threads keep going: Discourse recommended this thread to me when I was reading something else, as if it’s trying to optimize for engagement…)
and the “why doesn’t openstreetmap-carto render X” threads, and the “we should(n’t) map razed railways” threads, etc. ↩︎
10 Likes