Link between residential roads

Paul_Gafton · 2019-01-08T22:21:16.000Z

How to classify the link between 2 residential roads?

Currently, there is no residential_link. Leaving the link unnamed creates some very ugly issues.

smaprs · 2019-01-09T00:01:03.000Z

I’ve never seen an issue with unnamed links.
Even motorway_link doesn’t have to have a name.
If you have seen, please post an example, map url.
For classification, by default, might follow the same class of those 2 that are linked, if it keeps being inside the same residential area, as usual.

Paul_Gafton · 2019-01-09T07:48:14.000Z

Yes, links should be unnamed. The problem is that there is no label “residential link”. So, assuming a link between residential roads, it is currently labelled as residential road, which requires a name.

smaprs · 2019-01-09T11:32:06.000Z

Also it’s not mandatory a residential road to have a name.
There are places where the streets have no name.
The essentials are in
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dresidential

Tordanik · 2019-01-09T17:17:40.000Z

Do residentials commonly have physically separate links in your area? Seems unusual for low-importace roads, but this might be a regional variation.

Anyway, the noname=yes tag can be used to explicitly mark a road segment as having no name. This helps validators and similar tools.

Paul_Gafton · 2019-01-09T21:27:47.000Z

It’s not extremely common to have separate links, but it happens here and there. Also, due to the local guidelines some rather big roads get labelled as residential.

One problem with leaving the link roads unnamed while the main road is named is that the routers avoid usually unnamed roads if they have a named alternative. Does noname=yes avoid this issue?

alester · 2019-01-10T00:02:46.000Z

Paul Gafton:

It’s not extremely common to have separate links, but it happens here and there. Also, due to the local guidelines some rather big roads get labelled as residential.

One problem with leaving the link roads unnamed while the main road is named is that the routers avoid usually unnamed roads if they have a named alternative. Does noname=yes avoid this issue?

noname=yes simply specifies that this object doesn’t actually have a name. This is used because a highway=residential with no name tag could either be a road with no name or a named road for which the name just hasn’t been added in OSM yet.

I guess a router could use noname=yes to treat unnamed roads similarly to named roads, but it seems odd (or a bug) to prefer named roads over unnamed roads. I can point to countless examples where an unnamed road is the most appropriate road to use while navigating through an area.