Let's talk about highway classification in OSM

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@Tolstoi21

I reiterate that the fundamental problem I see in tagging the importance (or whatever) of cycleways is that cycleways don’t usually—and unfortunately from the point of view of the avid bicyclists I am—form a dense enough network that would warrant a complex gradation scheme. At least not in a way that does not simply coalesce with their physical features. This is true both in the long distance and hyperlocal cases, though for slightly different reasons.

I agree with this perspective. For my part, I supported the development of the very colorful Cincinnati Bike Map, which relied on OSM to prioritize physical realities over the aspirational routes the city and state governments had designated and signposted (verifiable! deterministic! silly!). If a topologically coherent cycling network is uninteresting or useless, then the concerns about this proposal being car-centric must be a bit overstated.

We’re seeing these contradictory reactions because the proposal is breathtakingly ambitious in scope but raises more questions than it answers. I hope no one took me too seriously that one time we were talking about highway=path and I started digressing:

@Minh_Nguyen

If OSM had been the brainchild of an American and dominated by American mappers familiar with American cartography, maybe we wouldn’t have wound up with so many highway=* values. Maybe we wouldn’t have even called it highway=*. Instead, I think we would’ve had so many endless debates about whether it’s more important to classify freeway/expressway/road/street/driveway versus arterial/collector/local/service that we would’ve all but had to compromise on separate roadway:construction=* and roadway:function=* keys. For sure, we definitely wouldn’t have lumped recreational paths and trails into the same top-level key as streets and highways.

That was a fun thought experiment.

(So no one will think they’re alone in sometimes longing for things to have worked out differently.)