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.
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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.
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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?