Hello Dear Community,
without further ado:
highway=residential” a valid concept? (e.g. for tagging roads of little importance in a large industrial zone)highway=unclassified” a valid concept? (e.g. for tagging streets which collect the traffic from a few residential blocks into a highway=tertiary, or streets that happen to form unintended low-quality shortcuts in the through road network)Cheers!
As always: It depends. But yes, it can be a valid use case, depending on how the local conditions and mapping preferences are structured. Alternatives here would be highway=service or, depending on traffic volume and importance, highway=unclassified.
Absolutely, that is precisely the purpose of an unclassified, as described in the wiki.
highway=unclassified: roads with the lowest priority in the interconnecting road network. Use when the traffic is not just for residential access, even if residential properties may also be accessed by this road.
I would say definitely not (unless someone has built some houses in the middle of the industrial zone). highway=residential is for roads primarily serving houses in residential areas, that aren’t significant through-routes.
Possibly, although I’d maybe put the bar slightly higher than you’re suggesting.
I would refer to Tag:highway=residential - OpenStreetMap Wiki for a more detailed description of what to use where regarding highway=residential and when to use other alternatives.
answer seems no, but I would like to see specific cases before answering with more certainty
if there are no houses whatsoever next to such road, I am far more sure with answer being “no”
there are limits to local mapping preferences
yes, road connecting villages will typically go through villages to take just one example
See say Way: 293582573 | OpenStreetMap
I am dubious about those, especially the second case
But, in the case of
, how can that be
if one should
, and the traffic concerned still is just for residential access? (even though the target building might be a turn away and not on the very street)
I have in mind cases like this one for example:
I guess that in such case it could be considered as transit? Not as a direct residential access?
But then it would follow that, in a grid-shaped neighbourhood, no street at all can be considered as “just for residential access” ever?
(since, for any given street, you can always find a part of the neighbourhood that, for some direction of travel, has to use the street for such considered “transit”?)
Feels a bit odd… 
That does not seem very helpful…
I wonder how it came to be that, after 20+ years of OpenStreetMap, the meaning of the most common street category is not really known?
(and, judging by the relative unpopularity of this thread, I also wonder why next to nobody seems to be bothered by this…)
The wiki article has been changed today by someone, and now the second paragraph of the wiki article contradicts the first one. To which parts should I refer now?
I reverted it as “Road with importance equal to a road in a residential area” is a nonsense
Polish-language wiki edit was reverted already.
Would e.g. this be considered a valid use-case of an “unclassified-residential hierarchy” in an industrial area? Or is highway=residential rather
a viable road category here?
Because no amount of forum discussion can retroactively define 68 million highway=residential and 18 million highway=unclassified ways, nor will a substantial amount of them realistically be retagged following a forum discussion or even a proposal, so it’s all futile
Let the wiki describe the current situation (in rough terms, to avoid thousands of words of discussion) and that’s all you can do
It’s not perfect but it’s what we have, you can’t change it, except by making a strongly-governed fork of OSM
this looks suspect at best, likely completely wrong
likely it should be Tag:highway=unclassified - OpenStreetMap Wiki as it seems that there is no residential area there
And also, does the distinction between residential and unclassified have important implications in practice? Maybe it does, but I suspect it is not obvious to most mappers. For example, the difference is quite subtle in many renderings. I would guess there are not many situations where a router will suggest an “obviously wrong” routing just because of this, but I could be wrong.
For comparison I looked at an area that seems similar in nature, also in Spain (Malaga in this case). I have added green for tertiary here. To be clear, I’m not saying one of these is more valid than other.
It looks like there is a stronger tendency to use unclassified for public streets entirely within industrial zones - and possibly a trend to move up the hierarchy to tertiary more quickly, although it’s hard to tell based on a small area.
There are inconsistencies here too - I don’t see any reason for the residential tagging south of the railway, as there is no housing on those streets. (North of the railway there are some genuine residential streets). But I found that most of these streets have not changed classification since they were first mapped around 14 years ago. It might be that those original mappers were just guessing based on aerial images, and nobody has had any strong motive to revisit the classification since then.
I basically translate these road classifications like this:
highway=residential - local traffic roadhighway=unclassified - local collector roadEssentially I consider residential to be the lowest classification of the general purpose road network with the primary purpose of providing access to and from service roads (driveways, parking aisles, alleys, etc) that lead to individual properties. I consider unclassified to be slightly higher importance in the network with an additional purpose of collecting traffic from other local roads and delivering it to higher classified roads. This is a fairly nuanced distinction though and most data consumers seem to treat these two classifications exactly the same as just meaning “local road”.
So does that mean you consider it residential even if all the individual properties are factories, warehouses, or retail outlets?
I can see the logic of that, on the grounds that these roads are structurally similar to residential, and just happen to serve different properties. It also tends to avoid a lot of situations where mappers would otherwise have to ask “which usage is the most prominent in this mixed use street”?
On the other hand, I can also see the logic that a single residential property is usually only accessed by the people who live there and a few visitors, whereas industrial/office/retail properties may be accessed by large number of employees and customers from a wide area. So having these at a slightly higher level in the hierarchy isn’t obviously wrong either.
I agree in any case that it doesn’t seem to make much difference in practice (unlike, say, the distinction between either of these and highway=service).
One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post about mapping patterns in Spain. Some editors label highway=residential as “calle urbana” here, which I guess tends to promote the use of this tag as applying to any urban street regardless of usage. I know StreetComplete does this, I can’t remember if there are others.
Yes, exactly. I don’t think of highway=residential as just meaning “residential road”, I think of it as meaning “local traffic road, similar to those commonly found in residential areas”.
since I started mapping the common understanding around here was always to require residents along the street for highway=residential (with some occasional discussion about unclassified, as either between residential and tertiary or on the same level - leaving aside the usage outside of settlements).
Then I’m afraid I think you’re wrong. The Wiki page at Tag:highway=residential - OpenStreetMap Wiki seems quite clear to me that highway=residential should only be used in (primarily) residential areas. This is a long-established tag, and many data users will be making assumptions based on what’s in the wiki. Given the long-standing nature of the tag, I assume that the consensus on the meaning/use of highway=residential would align with the wording in the wiki. But if people think the tag should be used differently, then please create a formal proposal to change the meaning, and put it to a vote.
What’s the issue with using highway=service? It’s the commonly documented tag for this purpose, and access can be handled separately with the appropriate access tags. While highway=unclassified is often used for major roads within industrial estates, it’s not meant to be a wildcard replacement for public local traffic within those non-residential estates.
In fact highway=service is used frequently in these industrial zones for ways that serve specific properties (driveways, parking aisles and so on).
The streets tagged as unclassified here are part of the public road network, indistinguishable from residential streets except that they don’t happen to have any residential buildings (or in fact in many cases wider and with more traffic than typical residential streets). I don’t think it is common to map those as service, at least not anywhere I map.