maxspeed documentation

General talk
1

Hi everyone!

Recently I came across some aspects regarding maxspeed that are a little confusing:

  1. For the numeric case (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:maxspeed#Values)) it is mentioned: “The maximum fixed numeric speed limit, followed by the appropriate unit if not measured in km/h when no units should be included.” On the other hand on the same page in the Developers section the regular expression is ^([0-9][.0-9]+?)(?:[ ]?(?:km/h|kmh|kph|mph|knots))?$ which seems to accept situations like maxspeed=10 km/h.

  2. In the Developers section it is also mentioned another regular expression that parses signals and none
    , but the Values section doesn’t mention anything about signals as being a valid value.

So my question is which part of the documentation is right?

Thanks!

2

They could both be right.

The first part is the current recommendation for entering values.

The Developers section may also try to help with values that may be in that database but don’t strictly follow the recommendations (or may have been in the database when the section was written). That could happen because not all mappers strictly follow the recommendations, or because the recommendations themselves change over time.

3

Thanks @alan_gr! Makes perfect sense. So I can conclude that if a mapper will do some edits today he should follow the guidelines from Values section, in order to avoid further inconsistencies.